Quote of the Month

Over at Gary North's Specific Answers, writes Dr. Gary North:

Lots of people celebrate July 4. I do not.

The Declaration of Independence justified armed secession. It was signed by a handful of lawyers on July 4, 1776. Secession was a way of transferring a great deal of power to colonial legislatures, where most of these lawyers were members. It was a way of replacing governors appointed by the King with governors elected by men of the colonies.

Then the law of unintended consequences once again made itself felt: higher taxes, hyperinflation, price controls, default on state debts, and (in 1788) a new centralized government that dwarfed the power of the British Empire's distant sovereignty in 1776. Finally, a new firm of democracy arose, a democracy of nine Supreme Court justices. The sovereignty of “we the people” – the most rhetorically powerful and most misleading phrase in American history – morphed into the sovereignty of five justices.

Surprise, surprise – but not to the Anti-Federalists of 1787, and surely not to the loyalists of 1776, who had their property stolen by the new governments after 1783. A hundred thousand of them were in Canada in 1788, living under a far less centralized government.

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