H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote this translation in the days during and after World War I. Woodrow Wilson's wartime central planning, which led to arrests of businessmen and other dissenters, caused him to wonder what happened to the ideals of the American Revolution. Perhaps the language of the original Declaration was too anachronistic for modern ears? He offered his own translation into American dialect.
Pundits and politicians, following innumerable scholars for 150 years, will twist and mangle the text to discern some other meaning from the document besides the obvious one.
Not just the Microsoft case, but the entire history of government regulation of monopoly is shot through with distortions of fact and unjust legal interventions.
The "People's Car" was beloved by the socialist Left, but the new beetle is a masterful product of labor specialization and capitalist engineering.
Garry Wills is a man with a mission. He wishes to expose for the falsehood that it is a myth that has bedeviled American history.
The idea of American freedom does not date from the late 1780s; the Constitution was the culmination of generations of practical self-government.
America' s first wage and price controls were enacted in Massachusetts, a little more than a hundred years after the first pilgrims arrived. The opportunities available in the New World combined with a strong work ethic were raising the wages of working men, to the consternation of their employers. In 1630, the colony' s Court of Assistants capped wages for several categories of skilled workers and for common laborers at 16 pence and 12 pence per day.
Legal scholar Gene Healy has made a powerful argument in favor of abolishing the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. When a fair vote was taken on it in 1865, in the aftermath of the War for Southern Independence, it was rejected by the Southern states and all the border states. Failing to secure the necessary three-fourths of the states, the Republican party, which controlled Congress, passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 which placed the entire South under military rule.
Greenspan recently said he is not sure what the money supply is. But money is like any commodity: it has a supply and it can be counted.
The judge in the Microsoft case says the company is like Standard Oil earlier this century. He's right, for the wrong reasons.
