Great Advantage Quotes
With the dissatisfaction with the British monarchy rising, American colonial leaders were considering many different alternatives. This quotation shows us that the year before Bunker Hill, the colonials were already thinking about independence but were examining alternatives for the new independent nation. The Jewish Republic was one that a number of Americans considered and some aspects of its civil law were incorporated into some independent State Governments and influenced thinking about the Federal Government in 1787.
The founding fathers, were well aware of one very ugly aspect of England’s parliamentary system. The King or Queen who does not care for legislation that was being debated, would, if they thought the offensive legislation would pass, would simply dissolve Parliament. The Constitution was written so that this can never happen.
Even before being an independent country, America had two contrasting and contradictory views of patents—the one that Franklin herein states and the one what was written into the constitution that argued that by granting patents inventors would be incentivized to make their trade secrets public if they had an exclusive monopoly on if for a period of time. Both of these philosophies towards patents have coexisted since then. There was a Federal patent system for those who wanted to use it, and for those who did not, they could enter the invention to the public domain as Franklin urged. Arguably, we have obtained the best of both approaches. Millions of patents have been filed and granted and yet some of the most important inventions have followed the Franklin approach. See the quotes about the Salk Polio Vaccine—{29154} and {29187} and the quote on "open source" computer software—{29676}. With billions of dollars being made by protected software in the early 21st century, over half of the world's computers were operating on systems that was public domain and without charge as just one large example of the Franklin philosophy still coexisting.
The “strike” was that of the Cloak Workers in New York. The workers were generally Russian Jewish Immigrants who were paid the lowest wages then of any ethnic group. See {625087}
