The Tax Revolt That Never Happened

There is a tedious meme making its weary way around FB. It shows a smiling British soldier and informs the viewer that the USA, a country that once fought a revolution against taxation, has just hired 87,000 more IRS agents. Where are the FB fact-checkers? There was no revolution against taxes, and one of America's chief propagandists was a former tax-collector. James Otis's slogan, "no taxation without representation," was a fine rallying cry, but as Otis and his sister knew well the New Englanders' main objection was ti search and seizure provisions that road roughshod over the Common Law protection of property rights.

What the FBI did to Trump a few days ago they do regularly. It was Sam Ervine's complaint against Nixon that the Attorney General John Mitchell was authorizing the FBI to make no-knock invasions of property. They take you property for back taxes or to make a developer rich, and there is no massive protest. Americans would rather complain about taxes to pay for the programs the insist on having but watch without blinking an endless series of illegal searches and confiscations.

Public Education has triumphed, when any number of sensible people think the American Revolution was a tax protest.

Avatar photo

Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina

9 Responses

  1. Allen Wilson says:

    I got tired of all those ignorant but often well intended memes several years ago. You can feel yourself degenerating mentally when you look at them, like you might when watching a Marvel comics movie or listening to rap or “modern country”.

    We live in a a large banana republic more socially corrupt than the worst South American dictatorships of old.. I have given up on the American people, and would gladly move to Uruguay or Paraguay if I were younger and wealthier. Now is the time to get out.

    I was watching the Nomad Capitalist on Bitchute a couple weeks ago, and he talked briefly about how Californians moving to Texas and elsewhere would ruin those places, and advised Californians who have sense, and anyone else in America who might be thinking of relocating to another state, to just go to another country instead. It makes more sense if the internal migrants will ruin your new state eventually anyway.

    Doug Casey did a video on Rumble today which was partly about the raid and the IRS expansion. It’s worth watching.

    As for public education, I just wish there were a country where no such evil existed. People need to study their genealogy so that history can become more personal to them, and more real. If you know something about how you great-great grandad experienced an event, or even what he may have done at the time, now it’s down to earth and part of your own history, not just the fables of the ruling class (“we fought because we were invaded…they said the were fighting over slavery”). As it is people think of history in abstract terms, or even worse, an ideological abstraction. They feel no connection to the past, and think of it as unimportant and of no consequence to today, when their entire lives are really just an echo of things past.

  2. Allen Wilson says:

    The Doug Casey video was on Odysee, not Rumble.

  3. Vince Cornell says:

    The problem with going to another country (other than not having enough money, having no way to be employed in the new location, and not speaking the language or being integrated with the culture – just a few small obstacles, those) is, similar to what Groucho once said when he resigned from a gentleman’s club, “I wouldn’t want to go to any country that would take someone like me in.”

    I’ve seen the meme Dr. Fleming references – I suspect it was made by a Brit to deflect from the current state of Britain which, as bad as things are in America, it seems to be even worse in Britain. At least in terms of Domestic turmoil and instability. We’re still USA #1 when it comes to global destabilization.

  4. Raymond Olson says:

    I’m too great a patriot–of Minnesota, of the Twin Cities, of St. Paul–to ever move, even if I could. I hope I would feel similar loyalties were I a native Californian.

  5. Michael Strenk says:

    I am very sympathetic to Mr. Olson’s remarks, but the New York that I loved is all gone except as distant muffled echos. They are taxing us out, all to support a school district I wouldn’t send a pet goldfish to for swimming lessons (they would inevitably try to teach it to get in touch with its inner cat and devour itself), and to keep the abortion machine running. I’ve had it. There is little for me to be locally patriotic about anymore except my garden/orchard and I can do that elsewhere more easily and with better results. We are so busy trying to survive here that we rarely ever even make it to the beach, which is a long walk away. I also rarely ever hear my native accent anymore, although most of the people around me were born and raised here.

    I suspect that most native Californians feel much the same. Are there any left other than Professor McGrath?

    Wasn’t Trump himself famously the beneficiary of eminent domain to build one of his tacky pleasure palaces in Atlantic City, evicting an old woman from the family home? I hear that that grand edifice has been shut down and may have already been demolished. Donald Trump, champion of the little man?!

  6. Allen Wilson says:

    Now we hear that they seized secret government documents which Trump possessed illegally. How are we to know if documents weren’t planted among those which were seized after they were in FBI custody? No one seriously doubts that the real purpose of this whole charade is to keep Trump from running for re-election.

    Mr Cornell, you do have a point, but I could wing it with whatever unfamiliar dialect of Spanish is spoken down there, with difficulty of course. I forgot to mention that Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia are to be recommended because they are agricultural societies and so there will be plenty of food there when everything goes down.

    Mr Strenk, I often feel no connection with younger people here in Arkansas for the same reason that you have mentioned, they speak in an alien accent even though they were born and raised here. I remember having a brief encounter with a man in his 70’s from the upper Midwest, who had moved to a small rural area in Arkansas, obviously because the area, as different as it is from his land of origin, reminded him of the rural area of his youth in some way, probably because it preserved a character now lost in his native area. I remember thinking that I had a lot more in common with that old Yankee than I did with many of the younger people here who are native to the soil. Somehow they can be alien to me in a way that he was not.

    Then there was the case of the YT video about historic Boston, complete with a tour guide who said she was born and raised there. Did she have a strong Bostonian accent? Of course not. It was all valley girl. I didn’t bother to watch the video because of that. If you’re going to say you’re proud to be from Boston, then you should sound like it.

  7. Russell Gordon says:

    I spent about 18 years outside of the United States, and lived long(er) term in Nepal, Argentina, Mexico and Serbia. Being a foreigner, I was rarely welcome and frequently harassed in these places and not allowed to live in peace as an immigrant. I have been living in Rockford, Illinois for 5 years and have never heard or had a cross word with anyone. There’s no place like home.

  8. Michael Strenk says:

    Some years ago, afraid of a total dissolution of American society, financial commentator Bill Holter left the U.S. with his family to live in Costa Rica where they stayed for about five years. As his Spanish improved he became increasingly aware of the level of hatred that the locals felt for all Americans and came to the conclusion that in a societal collapse there, he and his family would be slaughtered so they returned to Texas. Knowing the ground in any fight is a great help in surviving. This really comes through in William Gilmore Simms’ work. Of course, the patriots’ most dangerous enemies knew the ground just as well.

    We have come to the conclusion that the U.S. is the only place that we can hope to survive. We have strong family ties in two European countries, both red-headed stepchildren in the E.U. and so, paradoxically, rabidly pro E.U. I feel that in a crisis we would be targeted and potentially shunned even by family members. We certainly will not be going abroad to live among people with whom we have no ethnic, religious or linguistic ties although I agree with Mr. Wilson that here, I often find common ground with people with whom I would least expect it and such people are potentially more important allies than people with whom, one would hope, common ties should be stronger.

  9. Josh Doggrell says:

    I have a wealthy friend who is (seriously) contemplating a move to Belize. He is certain the US is, in the words of that great poet, Merle Haggard, “rolling downhill like a snowball headed for Hell.” He is trying to convince me to come along.

    Reading the comments above, I confess I do not have the answer. The Alabama and the South I loved are gone with the wind, and are not coming back. I throw myself and steer my family into the ministry of Christ, and we seem to be in a desperate holding operation until He comes back.