It was not that long ago that a group of men and women in this nation decided they had enough.
They didn’t have electric power. They didn’t have Teslas. Most homes didn’t have any sort of “plumbing”; there was an outhouse, as the named implied, out back — which was little more than a pit and a shack around it. Taking a bath required heating water over a fire, which then could be poured into a tub; a “shower” was unheard of. Indeed these people didn’t have cars; they rode horses or walked, and many could not afford a horse, so feet it was. There was no “welfare”, no AFDC and no Obamacare. If you didn’t work you either found someone who took pity on you — privately — or starved. They did have firearms, but not because someone gave them to them, and in fact the government kept trying to confiscate them or limit what they could own or where they could carry them.
The genesis of the American Revolution was a modest but real increase in taxes that the Crown attempted to impose, especially on what was at the time an effective national beverage — tea. I remind you that at the time the effective tax rate in the Colonies was a mere 2%, and the increase proposed was tiny.
Yet it, along with a government that wanted to tell people how to live, pushed the nascent Americans far enough over the edge that they grabbed rifles and told the soldiers — and the Crown to “get out.”
This post was published at Market-Ticker on 2017-07-04.
Follow on Twitter
Recent Comments