American History Recovered

Campus Report ^ | June 13, 2008 | Malcolm Kline

[bs9021]

American History Recovered

by: Malcolm A. Kline, June 13, 2008

Because of the game of teapot that American academic historians have been playing for decades, vital portions of U. S. history are in danger of becoming lost to future generations. Fortunately, scholars just outside the academy, who do tend to be more scholarly, are doing archeological digs, metaphorically speaking, to unearth this country’s past.

What the former usually do is quote each other. The latter actually dig up the primary documents that tell the actual story.

Hoover Institution scholar Alvin Rabushka has done just that in his epic study of taxation in colonial America. “Every framer of the Constitution served in the lower house of their state legislatures so they all had sophisticated experience with taxes,” Rabushka said at the Cato Institute on May 8.

More to the point, they didn’t care much for taxes, a disdain that they shared with their constituents. From 1771 to 1775 “the greatest number of Britons moved to the colonies,” Rabushka noted.

They had “a great conflict with the mother country,” he observed. The source of that strife: tax hikes.

Consequently, for example, “The state of New Jersey went 20 years without levying taxes,” Rabushka reported. “They used the interest on loans to fund the government,” he explained.

This aversion to taxes, Rabushka wryly noted, stands in marked contrast to the manner in which Garden Staters govern themselves today. Incidentally, like many think tanks housed at universities, Hoover, where Rabushka toils, is in but not of Stanford.

History such as that which Rabushka has chronicled follows more of a free market than a Big Government narrative...

[NaughtiusMaximus]

I read once that Jefferson favored lotteries as a way of raising public funds. Participation was strictly voluntary. I like that.

[Slapshot68]

““The state of New Jersey went 20 years without levying taxes,” “

Well they’ve made up for that over the last two centuries. Top tax bracket on individual income is near 9%.

[Red Boots]

This book sounds fascinating, but there is one thing I’m confused about, and that is the title of it. I followed the lonks, but it never says what the name of his book actually is. Do you know ? I’d like to read it.

[bs9021]

Taxation in Colonial America

http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=4565

[Chuckster]

Another excellent book to help understand the thinking of the founders is American Revolutionaries in the Making by Charles Sydnor. This one should be required reading for anyone interested in American History.