Gary North does not celebrate the Fourth of July — because of a term paper he wrote in grad 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.
The freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, he says — with the notable exception of the slave system, of course.
As a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.
(Hat tip to Kalim Kassam.)
Colonial America c. 1775 was the lightest taxed society on Earth.
The Kingdom of Great Britain c. 1775 was perhaps the heaviest taxed society on Earth.
Does Mr. North suppose that Britain would not have inevitably reached across the Atlantic to forcibly make the New World redress the imbalance of the Old?
That welfare queens enjoy tax breaks and receive benefits off the sweat of their fellow subjects is a given. Elevating welfare queenhood to high principle by glorifying 1775-era America for one passing moment when it was massively subsidized with funds squeezed from England’s teeming masses by the exciseman is folly.
Payment was bound to be demanded at some point and I prefer payment to be demanded by my own corrupt oligarchs rather than their corrupt oligarchs in distant London. If our taxes are higher, the folly is our responsibility. We tolerate the current level of taxation through apathy or lack of organization.
The purpose of the Revolution was that, if that day comes when it’s necessary to water the tree of liberty with more patriot blood, Americans can walk and not swim in remaking their government.
I fail to see how taxation rates have anything other than a slight relationship with a society being free. There is more to it than that.
For instance, I would feel more free in a society with, say, a 15% tax rate where I had some say in the decisions being made, than I would in a society with a 3% tax rate where I was a brute subject who’s opinion meant nothing to the ruling class.
This is a false comparison and means nothing.
I suppose the King made a mistake when he sent troops to defend the colonies from the French and then, after driving the French off the continent, asked the colonists to pay for it.
I see a strong but imperfect (inverse) relationship between taxation and freedom. Despite the rhetoric, the colonies found themselves ruled more thoroughly by a more intrusive government after they rid themselves of their “tyrannical” king.
And it’s not at all clear that a voter has any meaningful say in the decisions being made.
The British government under Elector George (the third of that name) and his ministers Stuart, Grenville, Watson-Wentworth, FitzRoy, and North failed to keep British North America because they failed to co-opt the native princes and elites as later British governments would do with with great success in India and elsewhere.
Walpole, through calculated neglect, and the Elder Pitt, through active co-option, knew this was the proper way to handle native elites. Pitt and others like Edmund Burke tried to replace the Government’s policy with one of institutionalized co-option but failed. In short, the Government insisted on following Dr. Franklin’s Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One down to the letter without realizing it was a parody.
As I understand it from my schooldays the Americans were being asked to pay 10% of the cost of driving the French out.