Iconic authors
Themes
Bibliography of the day
The Sweated Needle, or How the Minimum Wage Was Born in the Clothing Trades
The legal minimum wage was argued out over the sweated shirt. Its defenders accepted that underpaying trades might die under it. They never answered the harder objection: work, orders and cheap labour move, and the law can only follow.
Arches without emperors, the republic and its old fear of glory in stone
A triumphal arch serves no purpose but to say whom the state glorifies. From Rome to Napoleon's Paris and Washington's republic, republics feared the glory of living men, and kept the arch by handing it to the dead, to the nation and to ideas.
