"The 'pen' is mightier than the 'sword'...." or any other "elegant weapon" ___ a "civilized" age....

This is not the first time someone has quibbled with the original Franklin quote. In 2006, Michelle Malkin slammed Leftist protesters for featuring the quote without qualifiers. Yet that was a matter of semantics. There was, until now, no serious attempt to claim that in context, the quote meant something different…

Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as…