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.
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.
On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun. The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.
| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.
| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday. He turns 60 today, beginning his 61st year of life.
On March 4, 1789, the first Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution. Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.
| In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.
On March 3, 1991, an amateur videographer captured the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, thus ushering in the age of citizen surveillance of the state.
On February 27, 1830, American economist and free trade advocate Arthur Latham Perry was born.
| The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, was ratified on February 27, 1951.
The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, was ratified on February 26, 1951.
February 26 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.
In Law #46 of February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council formally proclaimed the dissolution of Prussia.
On February 24 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review.
On February 23, 1898, Émile Zola was imprisoned in France after writing “J’accuse,” a letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
Fifty-eight years earlier, Austrian economist Carl Menger was born.
Menger would go on to contribute to the development of the theory of marginal utility, which supplanted cost-of-production theories of value in economics, in his first book, translated into English as “Principles of Economics.” Though expert in mathematics (he served as tutor in economics and statistics to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria not long after the publication of the Principles), his approach to marginal theory was the least mathematical of his famous “co-discovers” of the principle, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras. Rooted in a subjective theory of value, it was the most realistic and least model-based of the marginalist revolutionaries, and he was most interested in price formation, not “price determination,” which focused almost exclusively on equilibrium conditions. He developed an evolutionary theory of money, as well.
Menger’s second book was a defense of a particular kind of general theory in social science, and an explanation of the importance of “invisible hand” processes in the social world. The first theme caused a firestorm of debate in the German-speaking world, where “socialists of the chair” and other opponents of laissez faire went ballistic regarding the possibility of permanence of finding laws in the social world that were not of their own constructing. The second theme developed ideas found in Adam Smith, and extended them.
Menger inspired two major followers, Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. The former named “marginal utility” and developed the first rigorous view of cost as opportunities foregone; the second advanced a time-preference theory of interest and theory of the structure of production. Later followers of this “Austrian School” included Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek.