She is, of course, the author of ??Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America??, a book that documents, among other things, that Wal-Mart doesn’t necessarily pay its employees enough to shop at…Wal-Mart.
Now, I’m sure some will say that it’s awfully overblown to “compare George III and George W. Bush”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/opinion/04EHRE.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fContributors, but she does a credible job of it. And she includes this important point on the issue of civil liberties:
b1. But it is the final sentence of the declaration that deserves the closest study: “And for the support of this Declaration . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that.
By signing Jefferson’s text, the signers of the declaration were putting their lives on the line. England was then the world’s greatest military power, against which a bunch of provincial farmers had little chance of prevailing. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t kidding around with his quip about hanging together or hanging separately. If the rebel American militias were beaten on the battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged as traitors.
