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Posts Tagged ‘American Revolution’

Give me Liberty or Give me America 2.0

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2024

Some truths are self-evident

“Endowed by their creator?” That won’t play well in Hollywood, or any big city in America 2.0. This was the basis of the Bill of Rights, which made the Constitution tolerable. How many Americans understand that we are born free; that our rights come from God, not from any government

Donald Jeffries

https://donaldjeffries.substack.com/p/give-me-liberty-or-give-me-america

As I’ve noted before, I was fascinated by history as a very young boy. And no part of history caught my attention like the founding of this nation. The American Revolution, the War for Independence- call it what you will. The Boston Tea Party. The Minutemen. Paul Revere’s midnight ride. The shot heard around the world.

I know that our Founders weren’t perfect. Thomas Paine, the brilliant writer who produced Common Sense, the pamphlet that helped ignite patriotic fervor in the colonies, wound up hating George Washington, who did indeed seem to have forgotten his invaluable contributions to the movement for independence. Shockingly and inexplicably, the location of most of Paine’s remains are unknown, as I detailed in Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963. Washington’s actions regarding the Whiskey Rebellion besmirch his reputation. He also was unfortunately swayed by the dastardly future Black Broadway star Alexander Hamilton, instead of Hamilton’s ideological foe Thomas Jefferson. This would have a huge negative impact on the future of the young republic.

And then there was Benjamin Franklin, who was a member of the blasphemous Hellfire Club. In the 1990s, some human bones were found in his one-time London home. The court historians were quick to declare that there was nothing sinister about this, and blamed it on a young medical student renting a room from Franklin, who went on to die very young, interestingly enough. But Franklin was an undeniably brilliant man, who discovered electricity among other things. And you have to love someone who said “There is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace.” Not to mention his very clever pickup line, which he used on the fair damsels of eighteenth century Paris, “Would you care to join me in the pursuit of happiness?” That’s way better than “you got any fries to go with that shake?”

Our Founding Fathers were the wealthiest men of their time. The One Percent if you will. Can we picture any One Percenter today like John Hancock, who is said to have written his name so large on the Declaration of Independence in order for King George to read it without his glasses? Think of Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet, and other billionaires meeting surreptitiously in small taverns, passing out radical pamphlets, all for the cause of human liberty. There wasn’t a eugenicist in the bunch. Well, maybe Alexander Hamilton. If he were actually around today, and not just a fake Black Broadway star, he’d be invited to Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove. But the rest of them would be relegated to appearing on humble little podcasts like mine.

Those who signed the Declaration of Independence did truly pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Quoting from my Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963: “Seventeen of those who signed the Declaration lost everything they owned. Nine of these men lost their lives in the conflict. Rhode Island’s William Ellery’s estate was burned to the ground during the war. William Floyd of New York suffered the same fate. Fellow New Yorker Frances Lewis saw his estates destroyed by fire as well, and he was imprisoned and died during his incarceration. One of the richest of all those who signed, William Livingston, died impoverished a few years after the war. John Hart of New Jersey risked not only his fortune, but his family ties. His wife was dying as he signed the Declaration, and he was forced to flee from the British when he headed home to say goodbye. He never saw his thirteen children again, and died in 1779. New Jersey Judge Richard Stockton was another British prisoner, and he too died a pauper. Wealthy banker Robert Morris gave away his fortune in an effort to finance the revolution. He also died penniless….Virginia’s Thomas Nelson, in a perhaps implausible anecdote, allegedly turned a cannon on his own home, which had become General Cornwallis’s headquarters, and destroyed it. He, like so many of the others, died in poverty. South Carolina’s Thomas Lynch, along with his wife, simply disappeared at sea.”

The very wealthy George Washington led his troops in battle. Picture one of our countless chicken hawk political warriors, like Lindsey Graham, subjecting themselves to anything more dangerous than a game of Risk. The American Revolution was a revolt of the One Percent. They weren’t rebelling against any homegrown aristocracy, but the yolk of British rule. They didn’t want to be under the thumb of royalty. Their guiding principles of consent of the governed and no taxation without representation were watershed concepts in human history. The whole consent of the governed thing was shattered by Abraham Lincoln, whose despotism contradicted the intentions of the Founders. As for taxation without representation; does your congressional representative represent you? And are you taxed?

Could there be any bolder words than these? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson’s unique intellect shines through here, and his thoughts remain relevant, almost 250 years later.

“Endowed by their creator?” That won’t play well in Hollywood, or any big city in America 2.0. This was the basis of the Bill of Rights, which made the Constitution tolerable. How many Americans understand that we are born free; that our rights come from God, not from any government? Pay particular attention to the very clear statement that the People have a right to alter or abolish “any Form of Government” when it no longer suits their needs. Jefferson would be arrested and prosecuted as an “insurrectionist” for such Thought Crimes in America 2.0. He’d be given a small cell, alongside all those January 6 defendants, who’ve been denied all due process. To understand his present reputation, look at his demeaning character in the Broadway play Hamilton. To millions of Americans, he’s the “racist” who “raped” Sally Hemings.

As inhabitants of the most corrupt society in the history of the world, this passage should resonate with all of us: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. 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.” Do those “long train of abuses and usurpations” sound familiar? Just imagine the list we could compile.

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Mercantilism: A Lesson for Our Times? | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on July 18, 2023

He concluded that the

“motive of all these regulations, is to extend our own manufactures, not by their own improvement, but by the depression of those of all our neighbors, and by putting an end, as much as possible, to the troublesome competition of such odious and disagreeable rivals.“

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. … But in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.“

https://mises.org/library/mercantilism-lesson-our-times

Murray N. Rothbard

Mercantilism has had a “good press” in recent decades, in contrast to 19th-century opinion. In the days of Adam Smith and the classical economists, mercantilism was properly regarded as a blend of economic fallacy and state creation of special privilege. But in our century, the general view of mercantilism has changed drastically: Keynesians hail mercantilists as prefiguring their own economic insights; Marxists, constitutionally unable to distinguish between free enterprise and special privilege, hail mercantilism as a “progressive” step in the historical development of capitalism; socialists and interventionists salute mercantilism as anticipating modern state building and central planning.

Mercantilism, which reached its height in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, was a system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state. Thus, mercantilism held that exports should be encouraged by the government and imports discouraged. Economically, this seems to be a tissue of fallacy; for what is the point of exports if not to purchase imports, and what is the point of piling up monetary bullion if the bullion is not used to purchase goods?

But mercantilism cannot be viewed satisfactorily as merely an exercise in economic theory. The mercantilist writers, indeed, did not consider themselves economic theorists, but practical men of affairs who argued and pamphleteered for specific economic policies, generally for policies which would subsidize activities or companies in which those writers were interested. Thus, a policy of favoring exports and penalizing imports had two important practical effects: it subsidized merchants and manufacturers engaged in the export trade, and it threw up a wall of privilege around inefficient manufacturers who formerly had to compete with foreign rivals. At the same time, the network of regulation and its enforcement built up the state bureaucracy as well as national and imperial power.

The famous English Navigation Acts, which played a leading role in provoking the American Revolution, are an excellent example of the structure and purpose of mercantilist regulation. The network of restriction greatly penalized Dutch and other European shippers, as well as American shipping and manufacturing, for the benefit of English merchants and manufacturers, whose competition was either outlawed or severely taxed and crippled. The use of the state to cripple or prohibit one’s competition is, in effect, the grant by the state of monopolistic privilege; and such was the effect for Englishmen engaged in the colonial trade.

A further consequence was the increase of tax revenue to build up the power and wealth of the English government, as well as the multiplying of the royal bureaucracy needed to administer and enforce the regulations and tax decrees. Thus, the English government, and certain English merchants and manufacturers, benefited from these mercantilist laws, while the losers included foreign merchants, American merchants and manufacturers, and, above all, the consumers of all lands, including England itself. The consumers lost, not only because of the specific distortions and restrictions on production of the various decrees, but also from the hampering of the international division of labor imposed by all the regulations.

Adam Smith’s Refutation

Mercantilism, then, was not simply an embodiment of theoretical fallacies; for the laws were only fallacies if we look at them from the point of view of the consumer, or of each individual in society. They are not fallacious if we realize that their aim was to confer special privilege and subsidy on favored groups; since subsidy and privilege can only be conferred by government at the expense of the remainder of its citizens, the fact that the bulk of the consumers lost in the process should occasion little surprise.1

Contrary to general opinion, the classical economists were not content merely to refute the fallacious economics of such mercantilist theories as bullionism or protectionism; they also were perfectly aware of the drive for special privilege that propelled the “mercantile system.” Thus, Adam Smith pointed to the fact that linen yarn could be imported into England duty free, whereas heavy import duties were levied on finished woven linen. The reason, as seen by Smith, was that the numerous English yarn spinners did not constitute a strong pressure group, whereas the master weavers were able to pressure the government to impose high duties on their product, while making sure that their raw material could be bought at as low a price as possible. He concluded that the

motive of all these regulations, is to extend our own manufactures, not by their own improvement, but by the depression of those of all our neighbors, and by putting an end, as much as possible, to the troublesome competition of such odious and disagreeable rivals.

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. … But in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.

In the restraints upon the importation of all foreign commodities which can come into competition with those of our own growth, or manufacture, the interest of the home-consumer is evidently sacrificed to that of the producer. It is altogether for the benefit of the latter, that the former is obliged to pay that enhancement of price which this monopoly almost always occasions.

It is altogether for the benefit of the producer that bounties are granted upon the exportation of some of his productions. The home-consumer is obliged to pay, first, the tax which is necessary for paying the bounty, and secondly, the still greater tax which necessarily arises from enhancement of the price of the commodity in the home market.2

Before Keynes

Mercantilism was not only a policy of intricate government regulations; it was also a pre-Keynesian policy of inflation, of lowering interest rates artificially, and of increasing “effective demand” by heavy government spending and sponsorship of measures to increase the quantity of money. Like the Keynesians, the mercantilists thundered against “hoarding,” and urged the rapid circulation of money throughout the economy; furthermore, they habitually pointed to an alleged “scarcity of money” as the cause of depressed trade or unemployment.3 Thus, in a prefiguration of the Keynesian “multiplier,” William Potter, one of the first advocates of paper money in the Western world (1650), wrote:

The greater quantity … of money … the more commodity they sell, that is, the greater is their trade. For whatsoever is taken amongst men … though it were ten times more than now it is, yet if it be one way or other laid out by each man, as fast as he receives it … it doth occasion a quickness in the revolution of commodity from hand to hand … much more than proportional to such increase of money.4

And the German mercantilist F.W. von Schrötter wrote of the importance of money changing hands, for one person’s spending is another’s income; as money “pass[es] from one hand to another … the more useful it is to the country, for … the sustenance of so many people is multiplied,” and employment increased. Thrift, according to von Schrötter, causes unemployment, since saving withdraws money from circulation. And John Cary wrote that if everyone spent more, everyone would obtain larger incomes, and “might then live more plentifully.”5

Historians have had an unfortunate tendency to depict the mercantilists as inflationists and therefore as champions of the poor debtors, while the classical economists have been considered hardhearted apologists for the status quo and the established order. The truth was almost precisely the reverse. In the first place, inflation did not benefit the poor; wages habitually lagged behind the rise in prices during inflations, especially behind agricultural prices. Furthermore, the “debtors” were generally not the poor but large merchants and quasi-feudal landlords, and it was the landlords who benefited triply from inflation: from the habitually steep increases in food prices, from the lower interest rates and the lower purchasing power of money in their role as debtors, and from the particularly large increases in land values caused by the fall in interest rates. In fact, the English government and Parliament was heavily landlord dominated, and it is no coincidence that one of the main arguments of the mercantilist writers for inflation was that it would greatly raise the value of land.

Exploitation of Workers

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Rothbard: The Free-Market and Antigovernment Roots of the American Revolution

Posted by M. C. on July 8, 2023

The State, in short, was to be kept extremely small, with a very low, nearly negligible budget. The classical liberals never developed a theory of taxation, but every increase in a tax and every new kind of tax was fought bitterly — in America twice becoming the spark that led or almost led to the Revolution (the stamp tax, the tea tax).

Rothbard: The Free-Market and Antigovernment Roots of the American Revolution

By Murray N. Rothbard

Mises.org

Historians have long debated the precise causes of the American Revolution: Were they constitutional, economic, political, or ideological? We now realize that, being libertarians, the revolutionaries saw no conflict between moral and political rights on the one hand and economic freedom on the other. On the contrary, they perceived civil and moral liberty, political independence, and the freedom to trade and produce as all part of one unblemished system, what Adam Smith was to call, in the same year that the Declaration of Independence was written, the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”

The libertarian creed emerged from the “classical liberal” movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Western world, specifically, from the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. This radical libertarian movement, even though only partially successful in its birthplace, Great Britain, was still able to usher in the Industrial Revolution there by freeing industry and production from the strangling restrictions of State control and urban government-supported guilds. For the classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian “revolution” against what we might call the Old Order — the ancien régime which had dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century, imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions. The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell conferred by central (and local) governments upon their favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic, war-making central State with privileged merchants — an alliance to be called “mercantilism” by later historians — and with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The object of the classical liberals was to bring about individual liberty in all of its interrelated aspects. In the economy, taxes were to be drastically reduced, controls and regulations eliminated, and human energy, enterprise, and markets set free to create and produce in exchanges that would benefit everyone and the mass of consumers. Entrepreneurs were to be free at last to compete, to develop, to create. The shackles of control were to be lifted from land, labor, and capital alike. Personal freedom and civil liberty were to be guaranteed against the depredations and tyranny of the king or his minions. Religion, the source of bloody wars for centuries when sects were battling for control of the State, was to be set free from State imposition or interference, so that all religions — or nonreligions — could coexist in peace. Peace, too, was the foreign policy credo of the new classical liberals; the age-old regime of imperial and State aggrandizement for power and pelf was to be replaced by a foreign policy of peace and free trade with all nations. And since war was seen as engendered by standing armies and navies, by military power always seeking expansion, these military establishments were to be replaced by voluntary local militia, by citizen-civilians who would only wish to fight in defense of their own particular homes and neighborhoods.

Thus, the well-known theme of “separation of Church and State” was but one of many interrelated motifs that could be summed up as “separation of the economy from the State,” “separation of speech and press from the State,” “separation of land from the State,” “separation of war and military affairs from the State,” indeed, the separation of the State from virtually everything.

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‘Missionary Journalists’ Are Lying About the American Revolution | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on February 9, 2023

Perhaps contemporary activists are blindfolded to the causes of our Revolution because they perceive government as benevolent—if not an avenging angel. In contrast, it was a common saying in the 1770s: “The Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People.” Americans took their lodestar from British political philosopher John Locke, who warned, “Nobody can desire to have me in his Absolute Power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the Right of my Freedom, i.e., make me a slave.”

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/missionary-journalists-are-lying-about-the-american-revolution/

by Jim Bovard 

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The 1619 Project is back in the news with the release of the six-part Hulu series built around its claim that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.” The 1619 Project, championed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times, has been canonized by progressives and is now being taught in more than 4,500 American classrooms. Vice President Kamala Harris jumped on the bandwagon last June when she told school children “black people in America” suffered “400 years of slavery.” Harris did not specify when she expunged the Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation from the history books.

African-American slavery was a profound injustice, and we should not downplay that abhorrent part of our nation’s past. But the 1619 Project is riddled with errors that have been debunked across the ideological spectrum by economic historian Phil Magness (who has done the best debunking), Professor Gordon Wood, the World Socialist Web Site, and many other respectable critics. The 1619 Project’s most harebrained idea is that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. This notion is impossible to reconcile with the fact that the conflict erupted in northern colonies with few slaves. The 1619 storyline could not have passed the laugh test unless many Americans were clueless on the British brutality that sparked the war.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., President John F. Kennedy’s court historian and a revered liberal intellectual, declared in 2004, “Historians today conclude that the colonists were driven to revolt in 1776 because of a false conviction that they faced a British conspiracy to destroy their freedom.” Was the British imposition of martial law, suspension of habeas corpus, and censorship not simply deranged fantasies of Thomas Jefferson? Apparently, it was paranoid to suspect the British unless King George III issued a proclamation announcing, “We will destroy your freedom.”

Slavery did help spark the Revolution, but it was “slavery by Parliament”—a common derisive phrase in the founding era. The Declaratory Act of 1766 announced that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” That meant Parliament could never do an injustice to the Americans, since Parliament had the right to use and abuse colonists as it pleased.

Law after law trumpeted Americans’ legal inferiority to their foreign masters. The Sugar Act of 1764 resulted in British officials confiscating hundreds of American ships, based on mere allegations that the shipowners or captains were involved in smuggling. To retain their ships, Americans had to somehow prove that they had never been involved in smuggling—a near-impossible burden.

Britain imposed heavy taxes on imports and issued “writs of assistance” entitling British soldiers to search any home for evidence that tariffs on tea or whiskey had been shirked. Massachusetts lawyer James Otis denounced those writs for conferring “a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” (Judges in Virginia refused to issue writs of assistance.) Britain prohibited Americans from erecting any mill for rolling or slitting iron; British statesman William Pitt exclaimed, “It is forbidden to make even a nail for a horseshoe.” The Declaration of Independence denounced King George for “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.”

Vermont patriots marched in 1775 against the British Army under a flag depicting a pine tree—a symbol of British tyranny. Because pine was an excellent material for building ships, Parliament banned cutting down any white pine trees and claimed them all for the British crown without compensation. Historian Jonathan Sewall, writing in 1846, claimed that the conflict with Britain “began in the forests of Maine in the contests of her lumbermen with the King’s surveyor, as to the right to cut, and the property in white pine trees.”

Firearm crackdowns proved the Brits could not be trusted. “By 1774, the British were routinely conducting warrantless searches and seizures of firearms in the Boston area…King George III ordered the seizure of any firearms imported into the colonies,” noted author Stephen Halbrook. The first major clashes of the Revolution occurred at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, after British troops sought to confiscate colonial firearms. After British regulars were cut to pieces at the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, General Thomas Gage decreed that “anyone found in possession of arms would be deemed guilty of treason,” as Professor David Kopel noted. Britain planned to confiscate almost all the firearms in the colonies after suppressing the revolt. If they had succeeded, colonists could have been subjugated to London for generations.

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Was the American Revolution a Mistake? – The Daily Reckoning

Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2020

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 Co., so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers’ cost on non-British tea.

https://dailyreckoning.com/was-the-american-revolution-a-mistake-2/

Gary North

By

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 (Princeton University Press). A review published in the Business History Review 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 transatlantic tax burdens may be a bit of moving target. At one point, he concludes that in the period from 1764–1775 “the nearly 2 million white Colonists in America paid on the order of about 1% of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or 1/25th 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 10 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 inter-Colonial and transatlantic 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.

Was the Declaration of Independence Built Upon a Lie?

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 obvious 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 his book, Rabushka gets to the point:

Historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times as much, 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 Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and for 17 years an attendee at his seminar, wrote this 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 cents to 8 cents a pound. Beef soared from about 4 cents 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 Dec. 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 Dec. 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 2,898 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.”

“There Was No British Tyranny, and Surely Not in North America”

Only after the price control laws were repealed in 1778 could the Army buy food 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. But there was no British tyranny in North America.

In 1872, Frederick Engels wrote an article, “On Authority.” 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 British Loyalists fled to Canada and other places controlled by the crown. They were not willing to swear allegiance to the new Colonial governments. They 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. The victors write the history books.

The Boston Tea Party: A Protest Against Lower Tea Prices

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 Co., so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers’ cost on non-British tea.

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’m not celebrating the Fourth of July today.

Regards,

Gary North
for The Daily Reckoning

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Pulitzer Prize to New York Times Essay Falsely Claiming American Revolution Was Fought to Preserve Slavery

Posted by M. C. on May 5, 2020

Not especially news worthy other than to once again emphasize that the NYT and Nobel committee are as embarassing to themselves as they are worthless to us.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/05/04/pulitzer-prize-to-new-york-times-essay-falsely-claiming-american-revolution-was-fought-to-preserve-slavery/

by Joel B. Pollak

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary was awarded Monday to Nikole Hannah-Jones for an essay in the New York Times that falsely claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect slavery.

The essay, titled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true,” launched the Times‘ controversial 1619 project.

The essay incorrectly claimed that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 (signing began weeks later, on August 2).

However, the far more egregious error was Hannah-Jones’s claim about the cause for which the Revolution was fought. She wrote: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

That passage, which appeared in the original text, has since been updated to include the word “some” (emphasis added): “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Historians were outraged by Hannah-Jones’s false claim. One of them, Northwestern University Professor Leslie Harris, was enthusiastic about the 1619 Project, but furious about the inaccurate claim. Harris recalled in Politico:

On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.

…

I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war….

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