“Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.”
William Cobbett (1763-1835), British pamphleteer, 1804.
March 9 marks the 1763 birthday of British pamphleteer and activist William Cobbett. Cobbett was known for his lifelong opposition to authority, and his later-in-life “radicalism,” which included his opposition to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws, and his support for Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett died in 1835.
In 1776 on this date, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith first published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the first widely accepted landmark work in the field of economics. It was not the first general treatise on the subject, however; that designation almost certainly belongs to banker Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, cited by Smith in his more famous book. It is also worth noting that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s systematic treatise, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement, also saw publication in 1776.
On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships. The Virginia was built on the remains of the USS Merrimack, and the battle is often referred to as between “the Monitor and the Merrimack.”
“The exercise of one coercion always makes another inevitable.”
Anders Chydenius (1739 – 1803) was a Swedish priest and politician born in what is now Ostrobothnian Finland. This quotation is from his “Thoughts on the Natural Rights of Servants and Peasants,” 1778.
Freedom is under assault, under siege. It’s not just from terrorists. It’s from the people we’ve assigned to protect our freedoms.
And, worse yet, the tyranny comes not just from the Big Guys in the nation’s imperial capital. Our local governments have picked up the tyranny bug. Welcome to Kafka’s America. Er, Amerika. Er, our America, today. (Kafka’s literary Amerika was a comic fantasy. But his nightmare of impenetrable bureaucracy, from The Trial, is becoming our reality.)
Click on over to Townhall. Then come back here for solidarity’s sake. Oh, and further reading:
Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
Free-speech advocate and historian Natt Hentoff talks about anonymous speech.
On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies. One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces close the port of Boston to all commerce.
“Government is naturally prodigal, for it spends other people’s money.”
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
On March 6, 1967, Joseph Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva defected to the United States.
| The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan.
| On this day in 1820, 1820, the Missouri Compromise was signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, brought Maine into the Union as a free state, and made the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.