I've been observing Independence Day this year by re-reading "The Discovery of Freedom" by Rose Wilder Lane. And eating too much barbeque.

It's an interesting little book, full of hits and misses. Lane herself was not entirely satisfied with it. As she grew older she became aware of certain factual errors in the text, errors that she would just as soon have let lapse into obscurity.

No such luck for Mrs. Lane. Her work, even when flawed, deserves a wider audience. In fact, I think I'm going to declare "Rose Wilder Lane Week" here at Classical Values.

We'll start small and see how things go. If I play my cards right, I can stretch this out for days without having an original thought. Without further ado, here's a brief meditation on creative destruction and the American city, coming to us from 1943.

Where are the sailing ships now?

Where are the fortunes invested in them? Where are the jobs of the sailmakers and rope-makers, the ships’ carpenters, the brass workers, the sailors and captains and pilots? Where are the fields of flax and hemp that used to blossom blue in New England, and the farmers markets for hemp and flax?

They were older than history. These investments for money, these markets, these jobs, existed before the Trojan wars. Where are they now?

They are in the Old World. Full-rigged four masters still beat down the Black Sea to harbor by Istanbul, and the round-eyed Chinese junks sail like schools of fishes over the Sulu Sea to Borneo. Lateen sails still move traffic on the Nile, and fleets of fishermen (how picturesque!) go out under colored sails from every port of the Mediterranean.

Only on one ocean, between these States and England, the sailing ships have vanished, utterly wiped out in half a century.

The industrial revolution destroys. It is a stream of living human energy as ruthless as Nature itself, destroying to create and creating to destroy. It makes all forms of wealth as impermanent as life. Rome, Paris, Vienna, Nuremburg, are solid rock; decade after decade, century after century those buildings stand. Every American city is a fountain of energy.

How they rise, (and fall) the incredible sky-reaching buildings, more tremendous, more beautiful, loftier and more living than any Acropolis, pyramid or castle ever imagined.

Happy Fourth of July.