American Revolution

[non-statist]

I'm surprised Stefan hasn't talked about this, (espec considering history is one of his interests). Was the revolutionary war really about taxes?  Wouldn't they have been better off being part of the monarchy? 

 

https://mises.org/blog/happy-we-should-restore-monarchy-and-rejoin-britain-day

[Susana]

The Truth about George Washington might interest you

[rosencrantz]

There is a whole series dedicated to that in the Revolutions podcast. Looks at it from all perspectives. 

[non-statist]

There is a whole series dedicated to that in the Revolutions podcast. Looks at it from all perspectives. 

 

Do you have links? 

[rosencrantz]

http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/page/10/

[luxfelix]

I recently came across this essay about, in part, the counter-intuitive support America received from monarchies vs. republics:

 

http://madmonarchist.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-royal-response-to-american.html

[Siegfried von Walheim]

I suppose the Truth About George Washington would answer half that question, and Stefan's general lines here and there the other half.

 

From what I understand so far, the Revolution was largely waged as a result of idealists who wanted to experiment with a philosophically-based free market, minimal-government system. The taxes part was certainly an impetus as the British Empire generally had a very low tax demand on its people, and protected its colonies from both other colonial empires and local barbarians. 

 

While it would be cheaper for most people to simply accept Imperial rule, the founders generally believed the Empire was unsustainable and therefore it would have been best to impose their free market limited-government creed on the 13 colonies rather than rely on the winds of fortune to continue blowing the sails of the British Empire. 

 

With the hyping of the scandals of the time, a significant number of Americans were able to be militarized into waging a revolution, which took a few years to end and about a decade for the last fragments of British strays to be chased out. 

 

Was it worth it? Depends. From the American perspective, the moral principle of self-governance is enough. However the people of the time identified more strongly as either British colonials or Dutch/Germanics living in British territory rather than a clearly defined nationality. Economically it was a burden to self-govern and compete with the Empire at first, but eventually we managed to stabilize and become the economical superpower we were by 1900. From a British perspective, things were largely the same trade-wise but somewhat cheaper as less tax money needed to be spent protecting Imperial interests in the Americas. From any other perspective, not much of a change although the republican nature of the revolution did inspire further revolutions, which could be consider an indirect result.