On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. 
The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.
Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity
(1877).
Born on July 20, 1754, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, French philosopher and economist. Perhaps best remembered for coining the term “ideology,” he didn’t mean by that term what scornful Napoleon and communist Karl Marx later turned it into — for Destutt de Tracy ideology meant “the science of ideas,” a unified approach to all knowledge, from epistemology to social theory.
Though his family had been enobled twice, he renounced the title and entered the 1789 Estates General conference as a member of the Third Estate. During the Reign of Terror, he was imprisoned, and would have been executed had not Robespierre got to the scaffold ahead of him.
Two of his books became popular in early 19th century America, his commentaries on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and his Traité de la volonté, which Thomas Jefferson, the editor of the American edition, retitled A Treatise on Political Economy. Tracy’s economics was of a deductivist stripe, familiar to readers of later economists such as Nassau Senior and Ludwig von Mises.
Destutt de Tracy’s politics was republican, and his preferred economic policy was laissez-faire.
Interference of any kind . . . in the spontaneous direction of industry, and the free employment by their owners of the great agents in production, labour, land, and capital, has the certain effect of benumbing their power and lessening the sum of production, and consequently the shares, of the producing parties; as well as of needlessly, and therefore unjustly, curtailing their freedom of action.
G. Poulett Scrope, M.P., Principles of Political Economy, Deduced from the Natural Laws of Social Welfare, and Applied to the Present State of Britain (1833), p. 231.
“Bloomers” were introduced at a Women’s Rights Convention that opened on July 19, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. Named after one of this article of clothing’s chief promoters, Amelia Bloomer, a women’s rights activist, the basic idea was to tastefully allow women a stylish and modest freedom of movement (the dresses of the day were notoriously constricting). The style did not exactly catch on, and it would be a long time before women would be allowed, by cultural convention, to wear pants.
Cartoon image is from 1851, entitled “Woman’s Emancipation.”
The entire logic of human existence can be formulated in five words — ‘produce in order to consume.’ Our reason and sense of justice revolt at the notion of a man who should perpetually consume without producing anything. Everybody understands that children should consume on credit: it is right that old persons should end by consuming what they have produced in their prime; it is perfectly proper that the worker should rest when tired, and consume a part of his surplus products. But he among us who should voluntarily live On another’s labour, and share useful things without adding to them, would be a true parasite.
Edmond About, Handbook of Social Economy; or, The Worker’s A B C, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., translated from the final French edition, 1873), p. 61.
On July 18, 1872, Queen Victoria gave her “Royal Assent” to the Ballot Act, which established secret voting in Great Britain. The bill had been introduced by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone — one of the queen’s least favorite prime ministers.
Recapitulating the Thursday and Friday Common Sense outings, Paul Jacob’s weekend column for Townhall is well worth checking out. And then coming back here for a little extra.
Guess where Paul Jacob is? At FreedomFest in Nevada!
Here is a video snippet of Gov. Gary Johnson’s speech. You may also have seen the terrific keynote by Sen. Rand Paul, since it streamed live on Fscebook yesterday. But this gives you a good idea of the quality of the talks.
Next week, perhaps, Paul might give us a debriefing on this year’s Freedom Fest. The photo at top shows a panel Paul was on with Gary Johnson.
How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can’t say and what we can show and what we can’t show — it’s enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.
Robert A. Heinlein, The Man Who Sold the Moon