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.
Defending he British Crown Commonwealth and the English-Speaking Realms
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice - G.K. Chesterton
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Americans and Liberty
Wrote Dr. Gary North, over at LewRockwell.com:
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ReplyDeleteBut GIII was nuts. And he lived until 1820; from 1811-1830 his bizarre and almost equally nuts son took over.
ReplyDeleteWhat Americans are not told is that many of their Founding Fathers were merchants getting rich off the smuggling trade and they objected strenuously when the Royal Navy was tasked to shut down their operations.
ReplyDeleteGeorge III was not showing any signs of porphyria until the first scare in 1788, a full five years after the American Revolution ended, and that was a temporary illness. His colonial policies were by and large determined by his ministers, especially that of Lord North, not by the crown itself.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty dishonest. The colonists weren't paying taxes to the Crown, and the Crown for a while looked the other way. As long as the colony was functioning and supporting itself, the King really didn't have much reason to worry about it. They were charged taxes without representation, but the fact is that hardly anybody paid them, so their lack of representation was justified. In any case, the British pretty much left them alone to do whatever they wanted. They knew that the Virginia coast was rife with smugglers (they had hired a bunch as privateers during the Seven Years' War), but felt that it wasn't worth dedicating RN resources to stopping them. It was cheaper to just keep the informal arrangement they had. They also didn't want to tie up their naval resources so hot on the heels of a major war with France. So they let it slide.
ReplyDeleteBut then the Tea Tax came along. The colonies would have been getting better quality East India tea at a cheaper price if they'd just paid a nominal import tax. It'd be like $2 Tuesdays at the movies, with 0.20 of that going to the King versus paying $5 to sneak up to a drive-in with a sketchy buddy in a car with binoculars and a radio scanner. You don't know about $2 matinees, but your mate tells you that it's $10 Tuesday, and $5 of that is tax. Oh, and they've hired more security guards at the drive-in, so now you can't go anymore. And the government has decided that the only movie playing will be Going My Way. Of course, it's all completely untrue, but London is a month away, and in any case, your mate Ben, who has no idea what your mate John is doing, is telling the King that everything is fine and everyone's happy.
In the age when mass media was a town crier, and information took months to move, nobody had any idea what was really going on between London and the colonies, and once dissent spread, the British were too far away to do anything about it until it was too late. By the time they realized that there was a rebellion going on, there wasn't really much that they could do about it. They responded as the morals of the day dictated, but in the view of the average colonialist, it simply confirmed what the rebellion's leaders had said. They could point to the arrival of British soldiers and say, "See? We were right, and the big, bad, Crown has sent a whole bunch of enforcers to shut us up." Kind of the way rioting, looting anarchists hold riot police up as proof that the system is oppressing them.
Were they free? Absolutely. Too free. In that regard, I think the Revolution was a necessary step. The colonies were so free, they bordered on lawless, and some kind of structure had to be brought in to restore at least a form of order. The Revolution effectively issued an ultimatum that they could either come up with their own government, or accept the British government, but one way or another, they'd have to get their house in order. They chose their government, and there are things to be admired in their system. To their credit, they did put a great deal of thought into the way they set up their system, and for the most part, it works. However, it's just plain false to claim that they were being oppressed by the Crown in 1775.