E.J. Dionne - What the Declaration of Independence really said.

[Anti Federalist]

It said that the founders wanted more government, or something...

Foolish Mundane, what were you thinking???


What Our Declaration Really Said

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/07/04/what_our_declaration_really_said_110446.html

WASHINGTON -- Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, "governments are instituted."

Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country's future we're usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy's give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.

This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe -- or have convinced themselves -- that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible.

[AuH20]

More leftist butchery of transcendent words:


No, our Constitution begins with the words "We the People" not "We the States." The Constitution's Preamble speaks of promoting "a more perfect Union," "Justice," "the common defense," "the general Welfare" and "the Blessings of Liberty." These were national goals.

I, for one, cannot wait until we can surgically remove this aggressive form of cancer.

[Matthew Zak]

This is how freedom dies... as docile people forget history over time, it is rewritten. If we can't turn this ship around we're going to have to have a real revolution.

[lester1/2jr]

the general welfare as i understand it means general as opposed to specific welfare. like we don't have laws favoring this people over that people.

[Brooklyn Red Leg]

Can we please go back to The Articles of Confederation? I swear to Ogg, it would be better to dissolve the Federal Government than let it come to bloodshed.

[heavenlyboy34]

Nice find, AF. Dr North has a post on a similar topic today-

http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1002.html
I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.
In 2008, Alvin Rabushka's book of almost 1,000 pages appeared: Taxation in Colonial America (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069113345X?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=069113345X) (Princeton University Press). In a review published in the Business History Review (http://www.hbs.edu/bhr/83/4/review-essay-taxation.html), the reviewer summarizes the book's findings.


Rabushka's most original and impressive contribution is his measurement of tax rates and tax burdens. However, his estimate of comparative trans-Atlantic tax burdens may be a bit of moving target. At one point, he concludes that, in the period from 1764 to 1775, "the nearly two million white colonists in America paid on the order of about 1 percent of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or one twenty-fifth, in per capita terms, not taking into account the higher average income and consumption in the colonies" (p. 729). Later, he writes that, on the eve of the Revolution, "British tax burdens were ten or more times heavier than those in the colonies" (p. 867). Other scholars may want to refine his estimates, based on other archival sources, different treatment of technical issues such as the adjustment of intercolonial and trans-Atlantic comparisons for exchange rates, or new estimates of comparative income and wealth. Nonetheless, no one is likely to challenge his most important finding: the huge tax gap between the American periphery and the core of the British Empire. The colonists had a sweet deal in 1775. Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth. Switzerland was probably the most free nation, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any other nation in 1775 that was ahead of Great Britain. And in Great Britain's Empire, the colonists were by far the freest.



I will say it, loud and clear: the freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, with the exception of the slave system. Anyone who was not a slave had incomparable freedom.
Jefferson wrote these words in the Declaration of Independence:


The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. I can think of no more misleading political assessment uttered by any leader in the history of the United States. No words having such great impact historically in this nation were less true. No political bogeymen invoked by any political sect as "the liar of the century" ever said anything as verifiably false as these words.
The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Some members signed the Declaration on July 4. The public in general believed the leaders at the Continental Congress. They did not understand what they were about to give up. They could not see what price in blood and treasure and debt they would soon pay. And they did not foresee the tax burden in the new nation after 1783.
In an article on taxation in that era (http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/5789), Rabushka gets to the point.


Historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times higher, than they were under British rule. More money was required for national defense than previously needed to defend the frontier from Indians and the French, and the new nation faced other expenses. So, as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.



The debt burden soared as soon as the Revolution began. Monetary inflation wiped out the currency system. Price controls in 1777 produced the debacle of Valley Forge. Percy Greaves, a disciple of Ludwig von Mises and for 17 years an attendee at his seminar, wrote this (http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/from-price-control-to-valley-forge-1777-78) in 1972.


Our Continental Congress first authorized the printing of Continental notes in 1775. The Congress was warned against printing more and more of them. In a 1776 pamphlet, Pelatiah Webster, America's first economist, told his fellow men that Continental currency might soon become worthless unless something was done to curb the further printing and issuance of this paper money. The people and the Congress refused to listen to his wise advice. With more and more paper money in circulation, consumers kept bidding up prices. Pork rose from 4¢ to 8¢ a pound. Beef soared from about 4¢ to 100 a pound. As one historian tells us, "By November, 1777, commodity prices were 480% above the prewar average."
The situation became so bad in Pennsylvania that the people and legislature of this state decided to try "a period of price control, limited to domestic commodities essential for the use of the army." It was thought that this would reduce the cost of feeding and supplying our Continental Army. It was expected to reduce the burden of war.
The prices of uncontrolled, imported goods then went sky high, and it was almost impossible to buy any of the domestic commodities needed for the Army. The controls were quite arbitrary. Many farmers refused to sell their goods at the prescribed prices. Few would take the paper Continentals. Some, with large families to feed and clothe, sold their farm products stealthily to the British in return for gold. For it was only with gold that they could buy the necessities of life which they could not produce for themselves.



On December 5, 1777, the Army's Quartermaster-General, refusing to pay more than the government-set prices, issued a statement from his Reading, Pennsylvania headquarters saying, "If the farmers do not like the prices allowed them for this produce let them choose men of more learning and understanding the next election."
This was the winter of Valley Forge, the very nadir of American history. On December 23, 1777, George Washington wrote to the President of the Congress, "that, notwithstanding it is a standing order, and often repeated, that the troops shall always have two days' provisions by them, that they might be ready at any sudden call; yet an opportunity has scarcely ever offered, of taking an advantage of the enemy, that has not been either totally obstructed, or greatly impeded, on this account…. we have no less than two thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight men now in camp unfit for duty, because they are barefoot and otherwise naked…. I am now convinced beyond a doubt, that, unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place, this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things: starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can."
Only after the price control law was repealed in 1778 could the army buy goods again. But the hyperinflation of the continentals and state-issued currencies replaced the pre-Revolution system of silver currency: Spanish pieces of eight.



The proponents of independence invoked British tyranny in North America. There was no British tyranny, and surely not in North America.
In 1872, Frederick Engels wrote an article, "On Authority (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm)." He criticized anarchists, whom he called anti-authoritarians. His description of the authoritarian character of all armed revolutions should remind us of the costs of revolution.


A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. After the American Revolution, 46,000 American loyalists fled to Canada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_%28American_Revolution%29). They were not willing to swear allegiance to the new colonial governments. The retained their loyalty to the nation that had delivered to them the greatest liberty on earth. They had not committed treason.
The revolutionaries are not remembered as treasonous. John Harrington told us why sometime around 1600. "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
The victors write the history books.
What would libertarians – even conservatives – give today in order to return to an era in which the central government extracted 1% of the nation's wealth? Where there was no income tax?
Would they describe such a society as tyrannical?
That the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence was signed by the richest smuggler in North America was no coincidence. He was hopping mad. Parliament in 1773 had cut the tax on tea imported by the British East India Company, so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers' cost on non-British tea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Tea_Act_1773). This had cost Hancock a pretty penny. The Tea Party had stopped the unloading of the tea by throwing privately owned tea off a privately owned ship – a ship in competition with Hancock's ships. The Boston Tea Party was in fact a well-organized protest against lower prices stemming from lower taxes.
So, once again, I shall not celebrate the fourth of July.

[Deborah K]

It said that the founders wanted more government, or something...

Foolish Mundane, what were you thinking???


What Our Declaration Really Said

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/07/04/what_our_declaration_really_said_110446.html

WASHINGTON -- Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, "governments are instituted."

Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country's future we're usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy's give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.

This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe -- or have convinced themselves -- that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible.

As soon as I read that the writer presumes we are a democracy, I knew the rest of the article would be flawed and misleading. And it is.

[heavenlyboy34]

More leftist butchery of transcendent words:



I, for one, cannot wait until we can surgically remove this aggressive form of cancer.

It's not butchery of "transcendent words". Patrick Henry (http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/preambles14.html) was right- "That this is a consolidated government is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is, to my mind, very striking. I have the highest veneration for those gentlemen; but, sir, give me leave to demand, What right had they to say, We, the people? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask, Who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the people, instead of, We, the states?"

[heavenlyboy34]

As soon as I read that the writer presumes we are a democracy, I knew the rest of the article would be flawed and misleading. And it is.
He misused the word, but his premises and conclusions are sound.

[Legend1104]

Nice find, AF. Dr North has a post on a similar topic today-

http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1002.html
I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.
In 2008, Alvin Rabushka's book of almost 1,000 pages appeared: Taxation in Colonial America (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069113345X?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=069113345X) (Princeton University Press). In a review published in the Business History Review (http://www.hbs.edu/bhr/83/4/review-essay-taxation.html), the reviewer summarizes the book's findings.


Rabushka's most original and impressive contribution is his measurement of tax rates and tax burdens. However, his estimate of comparative trans-Atlantic tax burdens may be a bit of moving target. At one point, he concludes that, in the period from 1764 to 1775, "the nearly two million white colonists in America paid on the order of about 1 percent of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or one twenty-fifth, in per capita terms, not taking into account the higher average income and consumption in the colonies" (p. 729). Later, he writes that, on the eve of the Revolution, "British tax burdens were ten or more times heavier than those in the colonies" (p. 867). Other scholars may want to refine his estimates, based on other archival sources, different treatment of technical issues such as the adjustment of intercolonial and trans-Atlantic comparisons for exchange rates, or new estimates of comparative income and wealth. Nonetheless, no one is likely to challenge his most important finding: the huge tax gap between the American periphery and the core of the British Empire. The colonists had a sweet deal in 1775. Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth. Switzerland was probably the most free nation, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any other nation in 1775 that was ahead of Great Britain. And in Great Britain's Empire, the colonists were by far the freest.



I will say it, loud and clear: the freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, with the exception of the slave system. Anyone who was not a slave had incomparable freedom.
Jefferson wrote these words in the Declaration of Independence:


The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. I can think of no more misleading political assessment uttered by any leader in the history of the United States. No words having such great impact historically in this nation were less true. No political bogeymen invoked by any political sect as "the liar of the century" ever said anything as verifiably false as these words.
The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Some members signed the Declaration on July 4. The public in general believed the leaders at the Continental Congress. They did not understand what they were about to give up. They could not see what price in blood and treasure and debt they would soon pay. And they did not foresee the tax burden in the new nation after 1783.
In an article on taxation in that era (http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/5789), Rabushka gets to the point.


Historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times higher, than they were under British rule. More money was required for national defense than previously needed to defend the frontier from Indians and the French, and the new nation faced other expenses. So, as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.



The debt burden soared as soon as the Revolution began. Monetary inflation wiped out the currency system. Price controls in 1777 produced the debacle of Valley Forge. Percy Greaves, a disciple of Ludwig von Mises and for 17 years an attendee at his seminar, wrote this (http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/from-price-control-to-valley-forge-1777-78) in 1972.


Our Continental Congress first authorized the printing of Continental notes in 1775. The Congress was warned against printing more and more of them. In a 1776 pamphlet, Pelatiah Webster, America's first economist, told his fellow men that Continental currency might soon become worthless unless something was done to curb the further printing and issuance of this paper money. The people and the Congress refused to listen to his wise advice. With more and more paper money in circulation, consumers kept bidding up prices. Pork rose from 4¢ to 8¢ a pound. Beef soared from about 4¢ to 100 a pound. As one historian tells us, "By November, 1777, commodity prices were 480% above the prewar average."
The situation became so bad in Pennsylvania that the people and legislature of this state decided to try "a period of price control, limited to domestic commodities essential for the use of the army." It was thought that this would reduce the cost of feeding and supplying our Continental Army. It was expected to reduce the burden of war.
The prices of uncontrolled, imported goods then went sky high, and it was almost impossible to buy any of the domestic commodities needed for the Army. The controls were quite arbitrary. Many farmers refused to sell their goods at the prescribed prices. Few would take the paper Continentals. Some, with large families to feed and clothe, sold their farm products stealthily to the British in return for gold. For it was only with gold that they could buy the necessities of life which they could not produce for themselves.



On December 5, 1777, the Army's Quartermaster-General, refusing to pay more than the government-set prices, issued a statement from his Reading, Pennsylvania headquarters saying, "If the farmers do not like the prices allowed them for this produce let them choose men of more learning and understanding the next election."
This was the winter of Valley Forge, the very nadir of American history. On December 23, 1777, George Washington wrote to the President of the Congress, "that, notwithstanding it is a standing order, and often repeated, that the troops shall always have two days' provisions by them, that they might be ready at any sudden call; yet an opportunity has scarcely ever offered, of taking an advantage of the enemy, that has not been either totally obstructed, or greatly impeded, on this account…. we have no less than two thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight men now in camp unfit for duty, because they are barefoot and otherwise naked…. I am now convinced beyond a doubt, that, unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place, this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things: starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can."
Only after the price control law was repealed in 1778 could the army buy goods again. But the hyperinflation of the continentals and state-issued currencies replaced the pre-Revolution system of silver currency: Spanish pieces of eight.



The proponents of independence invoked British tyranny in North America. There was no British tyranny, and surely not in North America.
In 1872, Frederick Engels wrote an article, "On Authority (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm)." He criticized anarchists, whom he called anti-authoritarians. His description of the authoritarian character of all armed revolutions should remind us of the costs of revolution.


A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. After the American Revolution, 46,000 American loyalists fled to Canada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_%28American_Revolution%29). They were not willing to swear allegiance to the new colonial governments. The retained their loyalty to the nation that had delivered to them the greatest liberty on earth. They had not committed treason.
The revolutionaries are not remembered as treasonous. John Harrington told us why sometime around 1600. "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
The victors write the history books.
What would libertarians – even conservatives – give today in order to return to an era in which the central government extracted 1% of the nation's wealth? Where there was no income tax?
Would they describe such a society as tyrannical?
That the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence was signed by the richest smuggler in North America was no coincidence. He was hopping mad. Parliament in 1773 had cut the tax on tea imported by the British East India Company, so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers' cost on non-British tea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Tea_Act_1773). This had cost Hancock a pretty penny. The Tea Party had stopped the unloading of the tea by throwing privately owned tea off a privately owned ship – a ship in competition with Hancock's ships. The Boston Tea Party was in fact a well-organized protest against lower prices stemming from lower taxes.
So, once again, I shall not celebrate the fourth of July.

I disagree with this article because it assumes that taxes are they only, or even the main reason for revolt. It also assumes that the colonies received anything of value from GB. The truth is that they did not. None of the colonies owed their creation, survival, or success to Britain on any level. They were all but ignored until that became profitable. Only then did GB acutually care, and even then it was only to gain benefit from the colonies. The great freedom and prosperity that the American colonies enjoyed was completely their doing and no one else. So yes they did have a sweet deal, but it was because they had worked so hard to get it. All actions GB had taken towards the colonies was to sap away their wealth. All tax, trade, judicial, and executive policies had been a negative towards the colonies. So, yes I agree with Jefferson's statement that, "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

[heavenlyboy34]

I disagree with this article because it assumes that taxes are they only, or even the main reason for revolt. It also assumes that the colonies received anything of value from GB. The truth is that they did not. None of the colonies owed their creation, survival, or success to Britain on any level. They were all but ignored until that became profitable. Only then did GB acutually care, and even then it was only to gain benefit from the colonies. The great freedom and prosperity that the American colonies enjoyed was completely their doing and no one else. So yes they did have a sweet deal, but it was because they had worked so hard to get it. All actions GB had taken towards the colonies was to sap away their wealth. All tax, trade, judicial, and executive policies had been a negative towards the colonies. So, yes I agree with Jefferson's statement that, "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

Yes, sort of, but compared to the tyranny established after the revolution (especially under the Constitution), it was nothing. Americans paid a 10th of what the British paid in taxes. Claiming that "All actions GB had taken towards the colonies was to sap away their wealth." is pure BS. The Brits and the colonists alike benefited from their arrangement. You're right about what Jefferson wrote, but he was being a dialectician and manipulator of words for emotional effect there.

[Anti Federalist]

Yes, sort of, but compared to the tyranny established after the revolution (especially under the Constitution), it was nothing. Americans paid a 10th of what the British paid in taxes. Claiming that "All actions GB had taken towards the colonies was to sap away their wealth." is pure BS. The Brits and the colonists alike benefited from their arrangement. You're right about what Jefferson wrote, but he was being a dialectician and manipulator of words for emotional effect there.

Anti Federalist...

I'm sure you can appreciate my pain at having to support the constitution to try and get back to a place where we can even begin to think about moving beyond it.

Oh, the "ironing".

But Patrick and the boys had it nailed didn't they?

They knew what was going to happen.

[Legend1104]

Yes, sort of, but compared to the tyranny established after the revolution (especially under the Constitution), it was nothing. Americans paid a 10th of what the British paid in taxes. Claiming that "All actions GB had taken towards the colonies was to sap away their wealth." is pure BS. The Brits and the colonists alike benefited from their arrangement. You're right about what Jefferson wrote, but he was being a dialectician and manipulator of words for emotional effect there.

I don't disagree with you about tax levels before and after the Revolution. For that matter, if our founders were alive today they would already have stormed washington with weapons, but to say that my statement is pure BS is pure BS. The policies they enacted (esp. the Navigation Acts) were not a benefit to the American colonies, but rather to Britain. If America had been allowed to trade with any country it wanted, instead of being tied only to GB, it would have done even better. I find it hard to believe that the Navigation Acts could be justified as benefiting the American colonies by anyone that believes in free markets. The simple fact is, the British saw success in the colonies and wanted a piece of the pie. They were not caring parents trying to help their child succeed, rather, they were more like parents who have a celebrity for a son and want to take advantage of him and spend all his money.

[Legend1104]

Anti Federalist...

I'm sure you can appreciate my pain at having to support the constitution to try and get back to a place where we can even begin to think about moving beyond it.

Oh, the "ironing".

But Patrick and the boys had it nailed didn't they?

They knew what was going to happen.

Yeah they did. I am rereading the Anti-Federalist Papers and it is almost scary at times how right they were about some things.

[Sola_Fide]

Great posts so far...

[robert68]

"Independence Day Propaganda" (http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory219.html)
by Anthony Gregory

[YumYum]

In Griffin's book he explains how the colonies printed paper and had run away hyper-inflation. Finally, the King said no more. Starting in 1751, every colony had to back their paper with reserves from the Bank of England. What happened? According to Griffin, the colonies experienced the best economic prosperity ever, between 1751 and 1775. So, where is the tyranny? My college professor said he did his graduate thesis on the founders and their true motive: land speculation. Washington was a surveyor, and he and his buddies bought land west of the Appalachians for a penny an acre. There was a fortune to be made, except there was one problem.

Britain forbid the colonists from settling west of the colonies, because Britain had an agreement with the Indians that the land west of the colonies was the Indian's, and that no Americans would settle on the Indian's land. (Unlike the United States, Britain kept its word with the Indians. That is why Canada has had very few problems with native Canadians.) Of course, the colonists were furious with this law; all this fertile farm land, and they were forbidden to farm it. This was the tyranny. The founders were sitting on hundreds of thousands of acres that they couldn't sell and profit from. This is the main reason for the Revolutionary War.

There is too much hero worship of the "founding fathers/framers of the Constitution". Yes, some of them were noble and decent, but they, like anybody else, were opportunists and promoted the colonies to declare independence for personal gain. Too bad that almost everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence ended up broke. They should have thought of that before hand, and counted the cost of going to war. I cannot see a "tyranny" committed by Britain that justified American colonists losing their lives.

If the colonists did the right thing: why is Canada in better shape than we are?

[Cowlesy]

We've been trying E.J. Dionne's and the rest of the D.C. Beltway's prescription for government for the past one hundred years or so, and look what it hath wrought us.

The article's substance is focused around where Jefferson placed the bullet-points in the Declaration, and Dionne's modern, progressive word-smithing. Next, Dionne will tell us that liberalism of the 18th century is exactly the same as liberalism in the 20th century.

It's amazing people get paid to write this stuff. Yes, let's do exactly what has lead us to our current predicament of circling the drain. That's what will fix everything!

[Sola_Fide]

Can we please go back to The Articles of Confederation?


Yes please.

[AuH20]

Jefferson would be right there with Paul Krugman advocating for more debt. 2 min mark. LOL Jefferson rightfully predicted that the money masters of the Northeast would eventually rule the country with an iron fist.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy7IFSS-F0I

[Deborah K]

"Independence Day Propaganda" (http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory219.html)
by Anthony Gregory

I'm sorry but most of these types of articles and viewpoints are just more armchair quarterbacking. :rolleyes: Anyone can pass judgement on the past when they have the advantage of 20/20 hindsight.

[Travlyr]

We've been trying E.J. Dionne's and the rest of the D.C. Beltway's prescription for government for the past one hundred years or so, and look what it hath wrought us.

The article's substance is focused around where Jefferson placed the bullet-points in the Declaration, and Dionne's modern, progressive word-smithing. Next, Dionne will tell us that liberalism of the 18th century is exactly the same as liberalism in the 20th century.

It's amazing people get paid to write this stuff. Yes, let's do exactly what has lead us to our current predicament of circling the drain. That's what will fix everything!
Caveat Emptor

We are in an information war. Knowing what to believe and what not to believe is the challenge. As the web weaves deeper, more and more truth is brought to light. Poor information destroys credibility, so the good writers will keep sharpening their pencils.


E.J. Dionne,

Whether they intend it or not, their name (Tea Party) suggests they believe that the current elected government in Washington is as illegitimate as was a distant, unelected monarchy. It implies something fundamentally wrong with taxes themselves or, at the least, that current levels of taxation (the lowest in decades) are dangerously oppressive. And it hints that methods outside the normal political channels are justified in confronting such oppression.
The Inflation Tax is the most egregious tax of all. Ignoring it does not make it go away.

Furthermore, using the first three Articles of the Constitution to trash the rest of it is not a legitimate government. As a matter of fact, it is wrong to swear an oath to uphold and defend the constitution then pass legislation in direct conflict with it.

[aGameOfThrones]

What the Colonist Said:

In 1842, judge mellen chamberlain interviewed ninety-one-year-old Captain Preston, a veteran of the battle of concord in 1775, to understand why Preston fought against the British.

Judge chamberlain: did you take up arms against intolerable oppressions?

Captain Preston replied that he had never felt any oppressions.

Judge chaimberlain: was it the stamp act?

Captain Preston: No, I never saw one of those stamps.

Judge chamberlain: was it the tea tax?

Captain Preston said no again.

Judge chamberlain: were you reading john Locke and other theorist of liberty?

Captain Preston: never heard of 'em. We read only the bible, the catechism, watts' psalms and hymns, and the almanac.

Judge chamberlain: why, then, did you fight?

Captain Preston: young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should.


Thomas e. Woods' politically incorrect guide to American history

[Sola_Fide]

Nice find, AF. Dr North has a post on a similar topic today-

http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1002.html
I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.
In 2008, Alvin Rabushka's book of almost 1,000 pages appeared: Taxation in Colonial America (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069113345X?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=069113345X) (Princeton University Press). In a review published in the Business History Review (http://www.hbs.edu/bhr/83/4/review-essay-taxation.html), the reviewer summarizes the book's findings.


Rabushka's most original and impressive contribution is his measurement of tax rates and tax burdens. However, his estimate of comparative trans-Atlantic tax burdens may be a bit of moving target. At one point, he concludes that, in the period from 1764 to 1775, "the nearly two million white colonists in America paid on the order of about 1 percent of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or one twenty-fifth, in per capita terms, not taking into account the higher average income and consumption in the colonies" (p. 729). Later, he writes that, on the eve of the Revolution, "British tax burdens were ten or more times heavier than those in the colonies" (p. 867). Other scholars may want to refine his estimates, based on other archival sources, different treatment of technical issues such as the adjustment of intercolonial and trans-Atlantic comparisons for exchange rates, or new estimates of comparative income and wealth. Nonetheless, no one is likely to challenge his most important finding: the huge tax gap between the American periphery and the core of the British Empire. The colonists had a sweet deal in 1775. Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth. Switzerland was probably the most free nation, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any other nation in 1775 that was ahead of Great Britain. And in Great Britain's Empire, the colonists were by far the freest.



I will say it, loud and clear: the freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, with the exception of the slave system. Anyone who was not a slave had incomparable freedom.
Jefferson wrote these words in the Declaration of Independence:


The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. I can think of no more misleading political assessment uttered by any leader in the history of the United States. No words having such great impact historically in this nation were less true. No political bogeymen invoked by any political sect as "the liar of the century" ever said anything as verifiably false as these words.
The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Some members signed the Declaration on July 4. The public in general believed the leaders at the Continental Congress. They did not understand what they were about to give up. They could not see what price in blood and treasure and debt they would soon pay. And they did not foresee the tax burden in the new nation after 1783.
In an article on taxation in that era (http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/5789), Rabushka gets to the point.


Historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times higher, than they were under British rule. More money was required for national defense than previously needed to defend the frontier from Indians and the French, and the new nation faced other expenses. So, as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.



The debt burden soared as soon as the Revolution began. Monetary inflation wiped out the currency system. Price controls in 1777 produced the debacle of Valley Forge. Percy Greaves, a disciple of Ludwig von Mises and for 17 years an attendee at his seminar, wrote this (http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/from-price-control-to-valley-forge-1777-78) in 1972.


Our Continental Congress first authorized the printing of Continental notes in 1775. The Congress was warned against printing more and more of them. In a 1776 pamphlet, Pelatiah Webster, America's first economist, told his fellow men that Continental currency might soon become worthless unless something was done to curb the further printing and issuance of this paper money. The people and the Congress refused to listen to his wise advice. With more and more paper money in circulation, consumers kept bidding up prices. Pork rose from 4¢ to 8¢ a pound. Beef soared from about 4¢ to 100 a pound. As one historian tells us, "By November, 1777, commodity prices were 480% above the prewar average."
The situation became so bad in Pennsylvania that the people and legislature of this state decided to try "a period of price control, limited to domestic commodities essential for the use of the army." It was thought that this would reduce the cost of feeding and supplying our Continental Army. It was expected to reduce the burden of war.
The prices of uncontrolled, imported goods then went sky high, and it was almost impossible to buy any of the domestic commodities needed for the Army. The controls were quite arbitrary. Many farmers refused to sell their goods at the prescribed prices. Few would take the paper Continentals. Some, with large families to feed and clothe, sold their farm products stealthily to the British in return for gold. For it was only with gold that they could buy the necessities of life which they could not produce for themselves.



On December 5, 1777, the Army's Quartermaster-General, refusing to pay more than the government-set prices, issued a statement from his Reading, Pennsylvania headquarters saying, "If the farmers do not like the prices allowed them for this produce let them choose men of more learning and understanding the next election."
This was the winter of Valley Forge, the very nadir of American history. On December 23, 1777, George Washington wrote to the President of the Congress, "that, notwithstanding it is a standing order, and often repeated, that the troops shall always have two days' provisions by them, that they might be ready at any sudden call; yet an opportunity has scarcely ever offered, of taking an advantage of the enemy, that has not been either totally obstructed, or greatly impeded, on this account…. we have no less than two thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight men now in camp unfit for duty, because they are barefoot and otherwise naked…. I am now convinced beyond a doubt, that, unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place, this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things: starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can."
Only after the price control law was repealed in 1778 could the army buy goods again. But the hyperinflation of the continentals and state-issued currencies replaced the pre-Revolution system of silver currency: Spanish pieces of eight.



The proponents of independence invoked British tyranny in North America. There was no British tyranny, and surely not in North America.
In 1872, Frederick Engels wrote an article, "On Authority (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm)." He criticized anarchists, whom he called anti-authoritarians. His description of the authoritarian character of all armed revolutions should remind us of the costs of revolution.


A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. After the American Revolution, 46,000 American loyalists fled to Canada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_%28American_Revolution%29). They were not willing to swear allegiance to the new colonial governments. The retained their loyalty to the nation that had delivered to them the greatest liberty on earth. They had not committed treason.
The revolutionaries are not remembered as treasonous. John Harrington told us why sometime around 1600. "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
The victors write the history books.
What would libertarians – even conservatives – give today in order to return to an era in which the central government extracted 1% of the nation's wealth? Where there was no income tax?
Would they describe such a society as tyrannical?
That the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence was signed by the richest smuggler in North America was no coincidence. He was hopping mad. Parliament in 1773 had cut the tax on tea imported by the British East India Company, so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers' cost on non-British tea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Tea_Act_1773). This had cost Hancock a pretty penny. The Tea Party had stopped the unloading of the tea by throwing privately owned tea off a privately owned ship – a ship in competition with Hancock's ships. The Boston Tea Party was in fact a well-organized protest against lower prices stemming from lower taxes.
So, once again, I shall not celebrate the fourth of July.



That was a great read.

[Legend1104]

That was a great read.


Except for the fact that it is very narrow viewed and misses tons of other important details. It only focuses on taxes. It is also dishonest in certain portions.

I have already rebutted this article once, so I will only add one thing. The Boston Tea Party was a bad idea in my mind too (though not totally unjustified), but the protest against the Tea Act was not. It is true that it did lower the price of tea, but it did not lower taxes, it increased taxes. The reason it was passed was to save the British East India Company. First, it extended a special refund against import duties to the B.E.I.C.. Second, it allowed the B.E.I.C. to import tea directly to the colonies and skip the middleman American merchants. This was meant to save money so the B.E.I.C. could be saved from bankruptcy. It did lower the price of tea because it cut out the tea merchants in America, but it also allowed the addition of a new tax on tea. So even with the new tax, the price was cheaper. One might think this is a good free market example that created lower prices, but it is not. In otherwords, Britain was giving monopoly control of the tea sales to it's own private company (large numbers of members of the British Parliment held stock in the B.E.I.C.) at the expense of the American merchants who, not only could not compete against a government supported business, but were forbidden by law from competing or even trying to sale to or trade with other countries (which is why they were smugglers in the first place).

P.S. the tea was owned by the B.E.I.C. and even though it was a private company, it was probably closer to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac than say Microsoft. So I would think that calling it a privately owned ship is being a little dishonest.

[Sola_Fide]

Except for the fact that it is very narrow viewed and misses tons of other important details. It only focuses on taxes. It is also dishonest in certain portions.

I have already rebutted this article once, so I will only add one thing. The Boston Tea Party was a bad idea in my mind too (though not totally unjustified), but the protest against the Tea Act was not. It is true that it did lower the price of tea, but it did not lower taxes, it increased taxes. The reason it was passed was to save the British East India Company. First, it extended a special refund against import duties to the B.E.I.C.. Second, it allowed the B.E.I.C. to import tea directly to the colonies and skip the middleman American merchants. This was meant to save money so the B.E.I.C. could be saved from bankruptcy. It did lower the price of tea because it cut out the tea merchants in America, but it also allowed the addition of a new tax on tea. So even with the new tax, the price was cheaper. One might think this is a good free market example that created lower prices, but it is not. In otherwords, Britain was giving monopoly control of the tea sales to it's own private company (large numbers of members of the British Parliment held stock in the B.E.I.C.) at the expience of the American merchants who, not only could not compete against a government supported business, but were forbidden by law from competing or even trying to sale to or trade with other countries (which is why they were smugglers in the first place).

P.S. the tea was owned by the B.E.I.C. and even though it was a private company, it was probably closer to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac than say Microsoft. So I would think that calling it a privately owned ship is being a little dishonest.

Good points.