"Declaration of Independence" by John Trumbull, painted 1818
"The Other End of the World"
Jefferson's break-up note and a
quarter-millennia trip back through time...
by Jeff Thomas
“What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector?
The taxidermist takes only your skin.”
~ Mark Twain
"When Thomas Jefferson sat down to compose that most eloquent break-up letter to King George III, known more commonly as The Declaration of Independence, he opted against the pithy “It’s not us; it’s you.” And a good thing, too.
Swarms of Officers: Nothing if not thorough, the aggrieved party enumerated a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations” such as are (or at least ought to be) well-known to any first year civics student. Along with having “plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people,” the jilted monarch stood accused of a comprehensive list of obstructions, deprivations and impositions such as would make even the most errant philanderer blush.
As it turned out, the freedom-loving men and women living in the “thirteen united states of America” were none-too-keen on their king having “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
Nor were they thrilled at his cutting off their trade with other nations around the world... depriving them of the right to trial by jury... or imposing taxes without consent. And that’s to say nothing of the king’s having “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
In short, the king’s subjects had had enough. So when, leaving little room for niggling ambiguity, Mr. Jefferson declared..."That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."
...he did a service not only for his newly realized compatriots – whom we might call “freed citizens” – but for their progeny, too... as well as for lovers of liberty on foreign shores. A pivotal moment in history, the Declaration was not merely the birth of one nation, but a signal to individuals living under tyranny in all nations, both then and since.
No Means No!
To frame it in a way that our younger, socially-enlightened readers might understand: America’s "Declaration of Independence" was a bit like the #MeToo movement, only for citizens and subjects suffering abusive power differentials under touchy tyrants, casting couch authoritarians and other such prehensile swindlers calling themselves “governments” the world over. The American Declaration gave others the courage to say to their own would-be overlords, “No means no!”
It is no mere coincidence, for example, that "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" was published in France only thirteen years after America’s very public sovereign divorce, during the height of the French Revolution. (Jefferson himself even helped with the wording, which was drafted first by the Marquis de Lafayette and finished, mostly, by Abbé Sieyès.)
That document gave the world the idea that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights” (Article I); that such rights, “natural and imprescriptible,” are “liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression” (Article II); and that “liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others” (Article IV). It also asserted the principle of popular sovereignty, in contrast to the divine right of kings.
All of which brings us back to our subject at hand... man’s natural rights, his complicated and ever-evolving relationship to the state, and the precedents set by those brave souls who went before him.
Consider for a moment the lines in the sand Messrs. Jefferson et al. drew under “taxation without consent,” the “right to property” and “sending hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Prior to their independence, American colonists paid between 1-1.5% in mostly indirect taxes, far below the 5-7% the crown levied upon their British cousins and a frightfully long way below the ~25% average Americans pay today. According to historian Alice Hansen Jones, at the end of the colonial era, Americans also enjoyed the highest annual income in the western world: £13.85.
Fast Forward a Quarter-Millennia...Today, America’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employs nearly one-hundred thousand officers to gouge hardworking citizens a percentage of their income that would have been unimaginable in Jefferson’s own time. And yet, even after sending forth an army of tax collectors to harass its people, at a non-trivial expense north of $16 billion annually, the appetite of the Leviathan is such that the pilfered lucre falls well short of satiation.
According to figures released by the US Treasury Department last Friday, the Biden-Harris administration rang up the single highest non-Covid budget deficit in history last year, with a shortfall topping $1.833 trillion. That was up 8%, or $138 billion, on last year’s number. Had it not been for the Supreme Court overturning President Biden’s student loan forgiveness scheme (~$330 billion), that figure would comfortably have sailed beyond the $2 trillion mark.
Per Treasury figures, the deficit came despite record tax receipts of $4.9 trillion, a number well short of the $6.75 trillion the government squandered on the various schemes, scams and boondoggles it calls “work.”
More concerning still, a critical driver of the deficit growth was skyrocketing interest on the national debt, which at $1.16 trillion for the year surpassed the trillion dollar mark for the first time in history. The national debt itself now stands at $35.7 trillion, an increase of $2.3 trillion from the end of fiscal 2023. Servicing the debt now costs more than the nation’s entire military defense budget.
Runaway debts... eye-watering deficits... an army of officers sent forth to eat out the substance of a nation… the growth and growth of an insatiable blobocracy... One is almost tempted to ask, What would Jefferson do?"
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