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.
You may never have heard of them, but they battled against the main cause of state expansion in the 20th century.
At the end of the century, Bill Clinton declared Franklin D. Roosevelt the "man of the century" for having "saved capitalism," echoing the gushing praise that Newt Gingrich has heaped on FDR, calling him "the greatest figure of the twentieth century." The greatest phony of the twentieth century would be more appropriate.
This year's political campaigns highlight at least one positive trend: the "best and brightest," who nearly wrecked us, are no longer wasting their talents serving the state.
The nation state just isn't what it used to be--and it's a good thing too.
Gary Wills's new book condemns distrust of government, and then fails in an attempt to cloak statist bias in historical garb.
Rothbard's classic history of colonial and revolutionary America, back in print at last.
