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So let’s recap: local self-government, secession, and strict construction. Not exactly the themes you learned in school.

They Don’t Dare Tell You What the 4th Is About

From the Tom Woods Letter:

Independence Day is tomorrow, and I wonder how many people really get why it matters.

In school, we were told this: “No taxation without representation.”

Zzzzzzzz.

The real principles were more like the following.

(1) No legislation without representation.

The colonists insisted that they could be governed only by the colonial legislatures. This is the principle of self-government. This is what the War for Independence was all about: local self-government.

Yet today, when the Supreme Court says the federal government has no authority over a particular issue and that it is better decided at the state level, instead of being pleased that the decentralized American political order is once again being respected, tens of millions of Americans respond as if Frankenstein’s monster were roaming the land.

2) Contrary to the modern Western view of the state that it must be considered one and indivisible, the colonists believed that a smaller unit may withdraw from a larger one. Today we are supposed to consider this unthinkable.

(3) The colonists’ view of the (unwritten) British constitution was that Parliament could legislate only in those areas that had traditionally been within the purview of the British government. Customary practice was the test of constitutionality. The Parliament’s view, by contrast, was in effect that the will and act of Parliament sufficed to make its measures constitutional.

So the American colonists insisted on strict construction, if you will, while the British held to more of a “living, breathing” view of the Constitution. Sound familiar?

See the rest here

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