Questions for Independence Day Evening

Our “social contract” is not a valid contract in any normative sense of the term, since the supposed parties never agreed to it. The standard response is that you agree by choosing to remain in the country. But that only works if the government already owns the country and so is entitled to decide who is permitted to live there, a claim that is itself based on the supposed social contract, which makes the argument circular.

A better metaphor than a contract would be a peace treaty. Different people in a society have different, and sometimes inconsistent, views of what each is entitled to. Since none of us has an unlimited ability to enforce his view, in practice we settle for some compromise, the best outcome we think we can get given the existing balance of forces. Viewed as a contract that is a contract made under duress, so not binding—but then, the same is true of a peace treaty, since the usual alternative to signing it is having people continue to drop bombs on you.

Where the real separations are needed: social infrastructure for services needs to be local, whereas the (nationally coordinated) physical infrastructures for manufactured product are generally okay, although some decentralization would help. But in order to gain local services outside of existing institutions, taxes would have to be demolished that currently pay for said services, and people would need the same protected rights for direct knowledge and skills use that they have for property rights, now.

Also, it behooves us as reasonable people to read both sides of the argument. We have read the Declaration, but have we read any rebuttals by royalists? Here’s one by Thomas Hutchinson, who seems to have invented “fisking” a full 200 years before the seeds of the internet were born:

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_content&task=view&id=1130&Itemid=264

(hat tip to Moldbug, of course. See “why I am not a libertarian”)

Thanks Art for bringing up Bryan’s past posts on whether America’s independence was worth war. I was thinking about it just this morning. The post of Bryan’s that you cited, along with similar ones here and here, were among many insights that helped make me a libertarian.

MikeP writes:

Social structure did not change at all.

There’s plenty of historians who would dispute you on that point, not least among them being Gordon Wood in his Radicalism of the American Revolution. He shows how many of the social and cultural practices still favored a quasi-feudal type arrangment of society with linkages of hierarchy and patronage that the revolution (partially accidentally from the founder’s perspective) broke down with the vitally important exception of slavery. The society of men who view themselves as equal, dynamic, and democratic that de Tocqueville saw in the early 19th century largely hadn’t been there prior to the revolution (Wood acknowledges that pre-revolutionary Americans had been closer than anywhere in Europe to a modern society of self-consciously equal people, but that they still weren’t there until the revolution broke down the remaining quasi-feudal societal bonds).

The American Revolution did not occur because people wanted independence: it occurred because people wanted their rights respected, just as their countrymen’s rights were respected in Great Britain. If the government in London had respected their rights, they would have been quite happy remaining British.

Probably not true here. Tax rates were higher in Britain and it’s certainly not clear the British government was a bigger threat to the rights of individual Americans than their own local governments were. Theocracies in New England and the rule of planters in the South tended to limit freedoms more than the British government did (and at points, the British government actually tried to limit some of these assaults on individual rights, especially with regards to some of the more enthusiastic religious persecutions that had occurred in Massachusetts and Connecticut). Americans didn’t really want the same rights as the British subjects (which actually would have been rather problematic for slavery given that the British common law had scrapped slavery centuries prior) especially given Britain’s significantly higher tax rate. They wanted to be de facto independent with British protection when required. That’s the deal they’d had for pretty much the entire 18th century up to then.

As to the question of whether the revolution was good from a libertarian perspective. The slavery and Native American questions are really big reasons to suspect it may not have been. At the same time, some of the comments of Bryan’s original thread are rather thought provoking so I withhold judgement for the moment.

There certainly was nothing particularly revolutionary about the American Revolution

No king. No noblemen. No established church. Those are fairly revolutionary.