This was supposed to be one of the rallying cries of the American Revolution, but in fact most of the Americans didn’t want representation in parliment because they new that they would just get outvoted and lose one of their strongest arguments against paying taxes to the British Crown.
My question, though, is I remember in High School my US History teacher said that at one point the British actually offered the American Colonies actual representation in Parliment but they turned it down. Is that true? Has anyone else read that before, or was my teacher mistaken?
Representation was not nearly as heavy an issue as modern historians have made it out to be. Many who favored independence objected to being taxed in general, founding fathers among them. I think that the emphasis on representation is largely a ploy by statist intellectuals to legitimize all the taxation under which we suffer today by virtue of our having representation. If everyone understood that the colonists took up arms to throw off a mere 4% tax rate, they might have had a lot more trouble in getting away with the more than 30% (and that’s just Federal) tax rate we have now.
MacFall is correct. The premise is using the old “begging the question” fallacy. The statist argument would be “taxation is good if passed by ‘our’ representatives”. Voting provides fuel for that argument: “the people have spoken”… End of question.
MacFall, I concur with your statement: Many who favored independence objected to being taxed in general, founding fathers among them.
I have to keep myself from throwing things at television screens or monitors whenever I see the images of the founding fathers telling people that what they need is a tax rebate to fix their car. Would Benjamin Franklin really say, What you need is a tax rebate from your government? Ha!
This is a false statement. Many of the founding fathers later went into government, and none of them objected to taxation. Some even introduced new taxes (Washington and Hamilton).
Yes. And many others were opposed to such things. “The Founding Fathers” were not a homogeneous mass. I suspect also that you think I am referring to the founders of the United States as Founding Fathers. I am not. I refer instead to the people who were behind and who fought in the revolution - almost a different group of men entirely. The Constitution had nothing to do with the revolution.
To most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and others who were not at that particular congress, but whose writings and speeches partly inspired the revolution.
Sydney G. Fisher, The true history of the American Revolution, published in 1902.
"The argument was, in effect, that the colonies were independent in government and merely under the protecting influence of the king, who would keep foreign nations from interfering with them, a condition which in international law is called a protectorate. They could not be brought into subjection to Parliament, because the king, as Edward Bancroft put it, “had a right to constitute distinct states in America,” and had so constituted the colonies. No power could unite them to the realm or to the authority of Parliament without the consent of the king and their own consent, given as formally and as solemnly as Scotland gave her consent to the union with England. Such consent, so far as the colonies were concerned, had never been given.[3]
“This patriot argument, however, had no effect. The English and the loyalists had an answer which swept all this learned and ingenious reasoning into the sea.”
Admittedly, I am not an expert on the subject, but I’d like to advance my thesis on the intentions behind the American Revolution. It is true that George III, prior to the revolution, had made a series of concesions in attempt to appease the colonists. To a very minor degree, the economic history of the American Revolution (and the actual cassus belli) are covered in Thomas diLorenzo’s How Capitalism Saved America. There are various articles on Mises.org which detail British taxation prior to the American Revolution; I would suggest Charles Adams’ The Rocky Road of American Taxation. Although I haven’t had the pleasure of reading Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty (yet), I also suggest it as a futher point of research. Perhaps some colonial actions were not justified by taxation; for example, the Boston Tea Party was carried out by a number of colonial “pirates” who felt their tea smuggling business threatened when Britain lifted tariffs for tea exported by the East India Company, making East Indian tea cheaper than tea smuggled from the Netherlands. Thomas diLorenzo points out that the East India Company had been given grants of monopoly on East Indian tea, crowding out potential competition. But, I don’t think that the main point of contention was a single tax and I don’t think the act of repealing certain tax acts subtracted justification from the United States’ war of independence. Stealing a term from Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan, British colonial policy is a case study of the ratchet effect, in which a step backwards in centralization and tyranny does is not equal to the step forward taking before it, and will only lead to another step foward; in other words, the net effect of government intervention is just a greater movement towards centralization and oppression.
Ultimately, I believe that it was this that the colonists were fighting. Of course, their aims were diluted with the coming of the Constitution, but then this becomes just another case study of the ratchet effect. This thesis also opens up a can of words, as it suggests that all degree of government is evil to an extent, because some government will just lead to greater government in the future (through the ratchet effect). But, this goes well beyond the subject of this particular topic.
To bring this to the present, I like Sheldon Richman’s short essay “Taxation with Misrepresentation” (link below) in which he sums up by saying, “If the politicians were serious about protecting the taxpayers, they’d leave us the hell alone.” Regards, Samarami.
MacFall said “Representation was not nearly as heavy an issue as modern historians have made it out to be. Many who favored independence objected to being taxed in general, founding fathers among them. I think that the emphasis on representation is largely a ploy by statist intellectuals to legitimize all the taxation under which we suffer today by virtue of our having representation. If everyone understood that the colonists took up arms to throw off a mere 4% tax rate, they might have had a lot more trouble in getting away with the more than 30% (and that’s just Federal) tax rate we have now.”
Specifically, who was involved in ,or helped lead, the revolution who was against the Constitution or who was against any taxes. I hadn’t heard this before.