Re: The War That’s Not a War

how can we be at war? Congress has not declared war, as required by
the Constitution, that is true.
---
true enough

But our Presidents have, and Congress
---
bought and paid for by jews

and the people have not objected.
---
some haven't
some don't forget

On Jul 3, 6:36 pm, "M. Johnson" <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> The War That s Not a WarbyRep. Ron Paul
> July 03, 2010Statement in the House by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas on funding the war in Afghanistan.In January 1991, we went to war in the Middle East against Saddam Hussein, Iraq s dictator who was our ally during the Iran-Iraq war. A border dispute between Kuwait and Iraq broke out after our State Department gave a green light to Hussein s invasion.
> After Iraq s successful invasion of Kuwait, we reacted with gusto and have been militarily involved in the entire region 6,000 miles from our shores ever since. This has included Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. After 20 years of killing and a couple trillion dollars wasted, not only does the fighting continue with no end in sight, but our leaders threaten to spread our bombs of benevolence on Iran.
> For most Americans, we are at war, at war against a tactic called terrorism, not a country. This allows our military to go any place in the world without limits as to time or place. But how can we be at war? Congress has not declared war, as required by the Constitution, that is true. But our Presidents have, and Congress and the people have not objected. Congress obediently provides all the money requested for the war.
> People are dying. Bombs are dropped. Our soldiers are shot at and killed. Our soldiers wear a uniform; our enemies do not. They are not part of any government. They have no planes, no tanks, no ships, no missiles, and no modern technology. What kind of a war is this anyway, if it really is one? If it was a real war, we would have won it by now. Our stated goal since 9/11 has been to destroy al Qaeda.
> Was al Qaeda in Iraq? Not under Saddam Hussein. Our leaders lied us into invading Iraq and deceived us into occupying Afghanistan. There is still really no al Qaeda in Iraq and only 100 or so in Afghanistan, and yet there is no end in sight to the war. Could there have been other reasons for this war that is not a war? A military victory in Afghanistan is illusive. Does anyone really know who we are fighting and why?
> Why has the war not ended? Nine years, and it continues to spread. Some claim it is to keep America safe, that our soldiers are fighting and dying for our freedom, defending our Constitution. Are we being lied to in order to keep us in this spreading war, just as we were lied to in the 1960s to keep us in Vietnam?
> We own the Iraq Government, as we do Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, we are fighting the Taliban, those dangerous people with guns defending their homeland. Once they were called the Mujahideen, our old allies, along with bin Laden, in the fight to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s. In that effort, our CIA funded radical jihad against that nasty foreign occupier, the Russians. What gratitude. Those same people now resent our benevolent occupation, with a little violence thrown in.
> The resistance to our presence grows as our perseverance wanes. Our people are waking up, but our officials refuse to recognize the longer we stay, the greater is the support for those dedicated to the principle that Afghanistan is for Afghans who resent all foreign occupation.
> The harder we fight a war that is not a war, the weaker we get and the stronger becomes our enemy. When an enemy without weapons can respect an army of great strength, the most powerful of all history, one should ask, who has the moral high ground?
> Military failure in Afghanistan is to be our destiny. Changing generals without changing our policies or our policymakers perpetuates our agony and delays the inevitable.
> This is not a war that our generals have been trained for. Nation building, police work, social engineering is never a job for foreign occupiers and never an appropriate job for soldiers trained to win wars.
> A military victory is no longer even a stated goal of our military leaders or our politicians, as they know that type of victory is impossible.
> The sad story is, this war is against ourselves, our values, our Constitution, our financial well-being and common sense. And at the rate we re going, it s going to end badly.
> What we need are honest leaders with character and a new foreign policy.

--
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Re: Myths of the 4th of July

"Hamilton was also the founding father of constitutional subversion. In contrast to Jefferson's strict constructionist views, which sought to use the Constitution as a limitation on governmental powers, Hamilton thought of the Constitution as a document that could be "reinterpreted" by clever lawyers like himself and his political compatriot, Chief Justice John Marshall, to provide a "rubber stamp" on almost any governmental activity. He was the inventor of the subversive notion of "implied" powers of the Constitution. As Rossiter explained (approvingly): "It seems certain that Hamilton would have affixed a certain certificate of constitutionality to every last tax . . . . Hamilton took a large view of the power to tax because he took a large view of the power to spend." "

It's Time To End Hamilton's Curse
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

For more than a century now, Americans have lived in what pundit George Will once called "Hamilton's Nation." Will was referring to the fact that government policy has long been primarily guided by the Big Government, interventionist political philosophy of Alexander Hamilton. Liberal writer Michael Lind edited an entire book of essays celebrating this fact entitled Hamilton's Republic. About every other month or so, neoconservative pundit David Brooks authors another New York Times or Wall Street Journal op-ed urging a "revival" of the Hamiltonian political agenda, as though it needs reviving.

To repudiate Hamilton's political legacy is, according to Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, "to repudiate the modern world" itself. Brooks and William Kristol began their crusade for "national greatness conservatism" with a September 15, 1997 Wall Street Journal article that urged Americans to "reinvigorate the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt."

In his book, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth, historian Stephen F. Knott informs us that Hamilton should be given ALL the credit for "the America that explored the outer reaches of space, welcomed millions of immigrants, led the effort to defeat communism, produced countless technological advances, and abolished slavery and Jim Crow . . ." When Time magazine asked him who his heroes were shortly after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich named Hamilton first (followed by John Wayne, Kemal Ataturk, and Father Flanagan).

What most Americans probably know about Hamilton is that he was a founding father, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers, and that his picture is on the ten-dollar bill. But he was much more than that, as the above-mentioned writers surely know. As Jeff Taylor remarked in Where Did the Party Go? William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy, "Hamilton, under the influence of the two political theorists most distasteful to Jefferson, Hobbes and Hume, was frankly the champion of the leviathan state." This is why in my forthcoming book, Hamilton's Curse, I discard Ron Chernow's advice about "repudiating the modern world" and explain why Hamilton's political and economic legacy must be repudiated if America is to ever again be known as the land of the free.


Hamilton's Curse

Hamilton worshipped government power for its own sake, and sought a government that would seek "imperial glory" (his words). He disrespected people like Jefferson who believed the primary purpose of government should be the protection of natural rights to life, liberty and property. He frequently complained of "an excessive concern for liberty in public men" and called for a government of "more energy." As Clinton Rossiter wrote in Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution, "Hamilton . . . had perhaps the highest respect for government of any important American political thinker who ever lived." His "overriding purpose" was "to build the foundations of a new empire" that could "reach out forcefully and benevolently to every person." (Forcefully, yes; but government is never "benevolent.")

Hamilton was the founder of the American nationalist tradition. As Clyde Wilson has pointed out, there is a sharp difference between nationalism and patriotism. Patriotism is "the wholesome love of one's land and people," says Professor Wilson. Nationalism, on the other hand, is an "unhealthy love of one's government, accompanied by the aggressive desire to put down others – which becomes in deracinated modern men a substitute for religious faith." Patriotism is necessary for people who wish to preserve their freedom; nationalism is not. In fact, it is always a great enemy of freedom. There is little wonder why so many contemporary statists, from "liberal" historians to the neocon establishment, idolize Alexander Hamilton.

And what does "Hamilton's Republic" look like, from a government policy perspective? It is one that is run by a dictatorial chief executive with king-like powers, for one thing. At the Constitutional convention Hamilton presented his real agenda: a "permanent" president who would appoint all the governors, and who would have veto power over all state legislation. "A king!" is what his Jeffersonian detractors accused him of asking for, and they were right. He failed at the convention, but few could deny that modern American presidents are every bit as king-like as Hamilton wanted them to be – and more. How else could one describe a president who can bomb any country in the world at will, and without the least bit of congressional approval?

Hamilton lied through his teeth in The Federalist Papers when he spoke favorably about states' rights and federalism, for his proposal for a "permanent president" would have all but destroyed any semblance of true federalism or "divided sovereignty," as James Madison labeled it. That destruction was essentially accomplished in 1865, after which the states became mere appendages of the central government. The final nails in the Jeffersonian, states' rights coffin were pounded into place in 1913, with the advent of the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment providing for the direct election of U.S. senators. In Hamilton's Curse I call this the "Hamiltonian Revolution of 1913."

Hamilton was a frenetic tax increaser as the nation's first Treasury Secretary. He championed a standing army as well, not so much to defend against foreign invaders as to intimidate Americans into paying all those burdensome taxes he had in mind for them. He proved this when he accompanied George Washington and 10,000 conscripts into Western Pennsylvania during the Whiskey Rebellion, a tax revolt over Hamilton's federal whiskey tax by Pennsylvania farmers. Hamilton wanted to hang the two dozen or so tax protesters that were rounded up, but George Washington pardoned them all, infuriating the nation's first Tax Collector-in-Chief.

The relentless crusades for the imposition of heavier and heavier taxes on everything and anything by all levels of government that curse America today are part and parcel of the Hamiltonian tradition. Hamilton never supported the idea of income taxation per se, but the centralization of political and economic power in Washington, D.C. that the federal income tax accomplished in 1913 can be considered to be the very pinnacle of Hamiltonianism.

Hamilton was an advocate of military adventurism in pursuit of what he called "imperial glory." Jefferson, Madison, and other founders thought this was the surest route to destroy American liberty, and they were right. Today, Hamilton's agenda of the pursuit of "imperial glory" is called "national greatness conservatism."

It was Hamilton who fathered the idea of a central bank run by politicians in the nation's capitol. As such he is America's founding father of central banking and all the economic miseries it has created, from the Great Depression to stagflation to the bursting of the latest housing price bubble.

With regard to economic policy, Hamilton was a British-style mercantilist who wanted to use the coercive powers of the state to subsidize selected businesses, who would in turn support the state and its growth. He was the founding father of "crony capitalism." Americans had just fought a revolution against such a system, and Hamilton wanted to turn around and adopt that very system in America. His political heirs finally succeeded during the Lincoln administration, and have been building on that "success" ever since.

Hamilton was also a protectionist who believed in some of the most bizarre theories used to justify government interference with free trade, such as his complete discounting of any value at all being attached to transportation costs. (His political disciple Lincoln would later repeat these hoary superstitions.)

Hamilton championed the creation of a large national debt for the sake of having a large national debt. The reason he gave for this was that the owners of the debt would be the more affluent people of the country, who would then be tied to the government and always be supportive of it, just as welfare recipients are today. They would be sure to support future tax increases, he reasoned, to ensure that they would not be shortchanged on their principal and interest. "A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a public blessing," he said.

Thanks a lot, Al. Today's national debt exceeds $9 trillion, and that figure does not count the additional tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and government pension liabilities. Every baby born is already thousands of dollars in debt.

A man as politically astute as Hamilton was most certainly had to be aware that the nature of politics would guarantee that a national debt would quickly become "excessive." (And it did.) He spent his entire adult life lobbying for "excessive" government and demeaning and scheming against those, like Jefferson, who opposed it. (Jefferson, in contrast, once said: "I consider the fortunes of our republic as depending, in an eminent degree, on the extinguishment of the public debt").

Hamilton was also the founding father of constitutional subversion. In contrast to Jefferson's strict constructionist views, which sought to use the Constitution as a limitation on governmental powers, Hamilton thought of the Constitution as a document that could be "reinterpreted" by clever lawyers like himself and his political compatriot, Chief Justice John Marshall, to provide a "rubber stamp" on almost any governmental activity. He was the inventor of the subversive notion of "implied" powers of the Constitution. As Rossiter explained (approvingly): "It seems certain that Hamilton would have affixed a certain certificate of constitutionality to every last tax . . . . Hamilton took a large view of the power to tax because he took a large view of the power to spend."

Having failed to create a "national" government at the Constitutional convention, Hamilton and his colleagues set out to pervert the document and "remold the Constitution into an instrument of national supremacy," wrote Rossiter. Hamiltonian judicial activists have succeeded beyond anything Hamilton could have imagined.

Hamilton did not lobby for the notorious Sedition Act that was enacted by his own Federalist Party (and which essentially made it illegal to criticize the government), but he did support it once it became law. Thus, he can also be considered to be one of the founding fathers of governmental assaults on free speech.

Hamilton's Republic is a republic of excessive public debt; inflationary finance fueled by a central bank that is the cause of perpetual boom-and-bust cycles; a dictatorial executive branch aided and abetted by "black-robed deities" who have "reinterpreted" the Constitution so much that the founders would not even recognize what is called "constitutional law"; a tax burden that is even more excessive than that borne by medieval serfs; a standing army that is misused at the expense of genuine defense of America; an arrogant, imperialistic, and monopolistic government in Washington that rarely pays any attention at all to the citizens of the once-sovereign states; government policy that routinely benefits big, politically-connected businesses and wealthy individuals at the expense of the rest of society (neo-mercantilism); and protectionism.

Every one of these policies has been a curse on America. That is why every one of them, from central banking to public debt to judicial activism, was vigorously opposed by Hamilton's nemesis, Thomas Jefferson, and his political heirs, until they were finally snuffed out for good by the Lincoln regime and the near total monopoly of power that the Republican Party enjoyed for the ensuing six decades.

The next time you hear Congressman Ron Paul, Republican candidate for president, calling for the abolition of the Fed and the income tax; a defense policy that defends America; drastic reductions in executive power; free trade and free markets; and a return to Constitutional principles, including the principle of states' rights, you are being given a chance to finally put an end to Hamilton's curse. Ron Paul is our Jefferson. Every other presidential candidate, Democrat and Republican, is a Big Government Hamiltonian, through and through.

http://politicalinquirer.com/2007/11/27/its-time-to-end-hamiltons-curse/

Re: Myths of the 4th of July

"The importance of the Jefferson-Hamilton struggle has been unfortunately obscured. It is a struggle which, in one form or another, has continued to mark our country since its inception. Hamilton and the Federalists believed in ever-expanding power of the federal government, a myriad of governmental regulations, controls, and special privileges in economic life, the crushing of the states, and limiting the rights of the individual. Their ideal was the British model ­ a strong monarch ruling the country in behalf of the "general welfare"; failing the adoption of a monarch, a strong President to act as benevolent despot. In foreign affairs, the Federalists looked to the British Empire as friend and ally. Hamiltonian Federalism was, in the profoundest sense, un-American; it represented a conscious harking back to the imperial British mode, a retention of the typically European forms of strong central government and semi-socialist "planned economy.""

Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian?
by Murray N. Rothbard

This article was originally published as "Jefferson's Philosophy" in Faith & Freedom, March 1951.

Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian? Every college student, indeed every literate person, is expected to choose up sides and pin a label on himself in the Great Debate. Most people today consider themselves as Jeffersonians. Groups as diverse as the States' Rights (or Dixiecrat) movement and the Communists consider themselves heirs to the Jeffersonian mantle. At one and the same time, conservative southerners refer to themselves as "Jeffersonian Democrats," while the leading revolutionary Marxist school in the country is called the "Jefferson School of Social Science." Amidst this welter of confusion, to find the true picture of Jefferson the man and political philosopher is an extraordinarily difficult task.


A Bewildering Mosaic

Analysis of Jefferson is made far more difficult by the complex nature of Jefferson's personality and career. A man of brilliant intellect; keenly interested in the whole range of human thought, from economics to architecture to scientific farming; active, dynamic, and spirited in an amazing multitude of enterprises, and moreover a political leader the greater part of his life, necessarily presents to posterity a bewildering mosaic. Politics itself is a day-to-day affair, imposing by its very nature on the politician a series of shifts and compromises. Thus, Jefferson combined within himself the qualities of a soaring intellectual spirit, searching for political principle, busy man of affairs, and political boss. When it is further remembered that Jefferson dominated the stage during the most vital years of the Republic (Revolution, Independence, Constitution, Growth, War, etc.), it becomes more understandable that so many contrasting groups can pick out of his immense record of writings and actions support for their own ideologies.


A Mere Scribbler?

But to an unbiased observer who explores Thomas Jefferson, his principles stand out indelible and crystal clear. His political philosophy has been imbedded deep into the very soul of America, and has imprinted itself on the minds of innumerable Americans of later generations. His achievement has been sneered at by Hamiltonians of our day as well as his. Hamilton, they claim, was a constructive and practical man of action. He funded the national debt, reformed the administration of government, established a national bank, etc. Jefferson was a mere phrase-maker and scribbler. These "practical men" fail to grasp that the forces which generate the actions of men, and therefore human history, are, for good or bad, the ideas of men. It is ideas, political, economic, ethical, esthetic, religious, that have prime significance for human action in the present and over the centuries. It is ludicrous to claim that Hamilton's financial measures were of comparable importance to the Declaration of Independence or the Kentucky Resolutions.

The battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, however, is of very great significance, and precisely because it represented a clash between two fundamentally contrasting systems of political principle. Jefferson's political philosophy is summed up in the phrase: ''That government is best which governs least." It received its finest expression in our own Declaration of Independence: man is endowed by God with certain natural rights; "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," and when government becomes destructive of that end, the people have the right to change the form of government accordingly. Thus Jefferson, as John Locke had done a century before, drastically shifted the moral emphasis from the State to the individual. In the absolutist and feudal era from which the world was beginning to emerge, divine right settled only on the kings, the nobility; in short, the State and its rulers. To Jefferson, the divine rights were conferred on each and every individual, not on rulers of government.


The Great Jeffersonian Lesson

What were these natural rights? The fundamental right, from which all others are deduced, is the right to life. Each individual has the moral right to live without coercive interference by others. To live, he must be free to work and acquire property, to "pursue happiness." In political terms, the one important natural right is self-defense; defense of one's life, liberty, and property from invasive attack. Government's function, then, is to use its power of force to prevent and combat attempts to use force in the society. If the Government extends its powers beyond this "cop-on-the-corner" function, it in itself becomes the greatest tyrant and plunderer of them all. Since the Government has virtual monopoly of force, its potentialities for evil are far greater than that of any other institution. The people must constantly keep their Government small and local, and even then must watch it with great vigilance lest it run amok. That is the great Jeffersonian lesson, and it is one that all Americans must begin to learn again.

From this basic cornerstone, the rest of the Jeffersonian edifice is easily deduced. It explains his passionate, lifelong adherence to States' Rights, his determined opposition to John Marshall in the latter's successful campaign to make the Constitution more elastic so as to permit wider extension of federal power, his very distrust of the Constitution itself and insistence upon incorporating a Bill of Rights.

Jefferson's position on foreign policy stemmed from the same source. He did not believe that our government, or any government, is equipped to remake the world by force to our own liking. He was frankly a whole-hearted patriot, whose natural love of the soil and his country was reinforced by the fact that America constituted the Great Experiment in Liberty. His foreign policy was expressed in this classic phrase: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations ­ entangling alliances with none." Particularly marked was his perceptive distrust of the wily imperialism of Great Britain.


The Fundamental Cleavage

In the economic sphere, Jefferson was not anti-capitalist, as his enemies charged. He believed in genuine freedom of enterprise, unencumbered by government regulation or grants of monopoly privilege. His opposition to paper money and a central bank were based on profound insight into the then new science of economics. Jefferson's almost unknown writings on banking, money, and depressions demonstrate that he was head and shoulders over the allegedly "practical men" who opposed him. What has since been interpreted as anti-capitalist rhetoric was simply expression on Jefferson's part of a personal preference for the soil and a distaste for the life of the cities.

The importance of the Jefferson-Hamilton struggle has been unfortunately obscured. It is a struggle which, in one form or another, has continued to mark our country since its inception. Hamilton and the Federalists believed in ever-expanding power of the federal government, a myriad of governmental regulations, controls, and special privileges in economic life, the crushing of the states, and limiting the rights of the individual. Their ideal was the British model ­ a strong monarch ruling the country in behalf of the "general welfare"; failing the adoption of a monarch, a strong President to act as benevolent despot. In foreign affairs, the Federalists looked to the British Empire as friend and ally. Hamiltonian Federalism was, in the profoundest sense, un-American; it represented a conscious harking back to the imperial British mode, a retention of the typically European forms of strong central government and semi-socialist "planned economy."

Our Constitution was forged as a compromise between the Jefferson and Hamilton forces, with James Madison acting as the eternal tightrope-walker and fence-straddler between the two camps. The trappings, the rhetoric, the specific issues have changed, but the fundamental cleavage remains, unresolved, on the American scene.



Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. He was an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher. See his article archives. Comment on the blog.

The War That’s Not a War

The War That's Not a War
by Rep. Ron Paul
July 03, 2010

Statement in the House by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas on funding the war in Afghanistan.

In January 1991, we went to war in the Middle East against Saddam Hussein, Iraq's dictator who was our ally during the Iran-Iraq war. A border dispute between Kuwait and Iraq broke out after our State Department gave a green light to Hussein's invasion.

After Iraq's successful invasion of Kuwait, we reacted with gusto and have been militarily involved in the entire region 6,000 miles from our shores ever since. This has included Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. After 20 years of killing and a couple trillion dollars wasted, not only does the fighting continue with no end in sight, but our leaders threaten to spread our bombs of benevolence on Iran.

For most Americans, we are at war, at war against a tactic called terrorism, not a country. This allows our military to go any place in the world without limits as to time or place. But how can we be at war? Congress has not declared war, as required by the Constitution, that is true. But our Presidents have, and Congress and the people have not objected. Congress obediently provides all the money requested for the war.

People are dying. Bombs are dropped. Our soldiers are shot at and killed. Our soldiers wear a uniform; our enemies do not. They are not part of any government. They have no planes, no tanks, no ships, no missiles, and no modern technology. What kind of a war is this anyway, if it really is one? If it was a real war, we would have won it by now. Our stated goal since 9/11 has been to destroy al Qaeda.

Was al Qaeda in Iraq? Not under Saddam Hussein. Our leaders lied us into invading Iraq and deceived us into occupying Afghanistan. There is still really no al Qaeda in Iraq and only 100 or so in Afghanistan, and yet there is no end in sight to the war. Could there have been other reasons for this war that is not a war? A military victory in Afghanistan is illusive. Does anyone really know who we are fighting and why?

Why has the war not ended? Nine years, and it continues to spread. Some claim it is to keep America safe, that our soldiers are fighting and dying for our freedom, defending our Constitution. Are we being lied to in order to keep us in this spreading war, just as we were lied to in the 1960s to keep us in Vietnam?

We own the Iraq Government, as we do Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, we are fighting the Taliban, those dangerous people with guns defending their homeland. Once they were called the Mujahideen, our old allies, along with bin Laden, in the fight to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s. In that effort, our CIA funded radical jihad against that nasty foreign occupier, the Russians. What gratitude. Those same people now resent our benevolent occupation, with a little violence thrown in.

The resistance to our presence grows as our perseverance wanes. Our people are waking up, but our officials refuse to recognize the longer we stay, the greater is the support for those dedicated to the principle that Afghanistan is for Afghans who resent all foreign occupation.

The harder we fight a war that is not a war, the weaker we get and the stronger becomes our enemy. When an enemy without weapons can respect an army of great strength, the most powerful of all history, one should ask, who has the moral high ground?

Military failure in Afghanistan is to be our destiny. Changing generals without changing our policies or our policymakers perpetuates our agony and delays the inevitable.

This is not a war that our generals have been trained for. Nation building, police work, social engineering is never a job for foreign occupiers and never an appropriate job for soldiers trained to win wars.

A military victory is no longer even a stated goal of our military leaders or our politicians, as they know that type of victory is impossible.

The sad story is, this war is against ourselves, our values, our Constitution, our financial well-being and common sense. And at the rate we're going, it's going to end badly.

What we need are honest leaders with character and a new foreign policy.

Myths of the 4th of July

"In the Founders' day, the 4th of July was a partisan holiday. It was celebrated in the 1790s and 1800s by Jeffersonian Republicans desirous of showing their devotion to Jeffersonian, rather than Hamiltonian, political philosophy. If you were a Federalist in the 1790s, you likely would celebrate Washington's Birthday instead of the 4th of July. If you believed in the inherent power of the Executive in formulating foreign policy, in the power of Congress to charter a bank despite the absence of express constitutional authorization to do so, and in the power of the federal government to punish people who criticized the president or Congress, you would not celebrate the 4th. The 4th was the holiday of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, those great states'-rights blasts at federal lawlessness. It was the anti-Hamilton, anti-Washington, anti-nationalist holiday."

Myths of the 4th of July
by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

America's national holiday is the 4th of July, the anniversary of public promulgation of the Declaration of Independence. The 4th of July, like many other government holidays, is surrounded by numerous myths. Some of the most notable:

The 4th of July is a celebration of the U.S. Constitution.

Actually, the U.S. Constitution's purpose was to remake the American governments of the Revolution by making the system less democratic. The delegates from 12 states who met in Philadelphia in summer 1787 had been sent by the states to recommend amendments to the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they instantly decided to meet in secret, and then the nationalists among them tried to win adoption of a national – rather than a federal – constitution.

The 4th of July was the day that the 13 states established their independence.

No, it was not. In fact, Virginia established its independence on May 15, 1776, when its revolutionary Convention adopted resolutions for a declaration of rights, a permanent republican constitution, and federal and treaty relationships with other states and foreign countries. It was because the Old Dominion had already established its independence – had, in fact, already sworn in the first governor under its permanent republican constitution of 1776, Patrick Henry, on June 29 – that Virginia's congressmen, uniquely, had been given categorical instructions from their state legislature to declare independence. Virginia was not the only state whose independence was not established by the Declaration on the 4th, as New York's congressional delegation did not then join in the Declaration. In short, the states became independent in their own good time – some on July 4, some before, some after.

The chief legacy of the 4th of July is the political philosophy set out in the Declaration of Independence.

Since the 18th century, political radicals have argued for understanding the Declaration as a general warrant for government to do anything it likes to forward the idea that "all men are created equal." Yet, that was not what the Declaration of Independence meant. The Declaration of Independence was the work of a congress of representatives of state governments. Congressmen were not elected by voters at large, but by state legislatures, and their role (as John Adams, one of them, put it) was more akin to that of ambassadors than to legislators. They had not been empowered to dedicate society to any particular political philosophy, but to declare – as the Virginia legislature had told its congressmen to declare – that the colonies were, "and of right ought to be, free and independent states." In other words, the Declaration was about states' rights, not individual rights, and the Congress that adopted it had no power to make it anything else. All the rest of the Declaration was mere rhetorical predicate.

The 4th of July is a non-partisan holiday dedicated to recalling the legacy of the American Revolution.

In the Founders' day, the 4th of July was a partisan holiday. It was celebrated in the 1790s and 1800s by Jeffersonian Republicans desirous of showing their devotion to Jeffersonian, rather than Hamiltonian, political philosophy. If you were a Federalist in the 1790s, you likely would celebrate Washington's Birthday instead of the 4th of July. If you believed in the inherent power of the Executive in formulating foreign policy, in the power of Congress to charter a bank despite the absence of express constitutional authorization to do so, and in the power of the federal government to punish people who criticized the president or Congress, you would not celebrate the 4th. The 4th was the holiday of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, those great states'-rights blasts at federal lawlessness. It was the anti-Hamilton, anti-Washington, anti-nationalist holiday.

The fulfillment of the 4th of July lay in the establishment of a powerful national government.

Celebrants of the 4th of July in the Founders' day rejected the idea that the Constitution had created a national government, but insisted that it was federal instead. That is, they said that Congress had only the powers it had been expressly delegated, chiefly through Article I, Section 8, that the federal courts had no more jurisdiction than they had been assigned through Article III, and that the vast majority of government functions had been kept by the states. When federal courts grabbed for more power in 1793, these people added the Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution. In response to the nationalists' war on France and Alien and Sedition Acts, they first adopted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, then elected Republicans – Jeffersonian states'-rights/laissez-faire advocates – to run their government.

The Declaration of Independence stood for the rights of white, male property owners alone.

As noted above, the philosophical material in the first section of the Declaration, although commonplace at the time, had no legal or moral weight. Congress had no power to commit the states to it. Yet, given that fact, one might also note that revolutionaries who accepted the Lockean version of social compact theory did not necessarily believe that only white, male property holders had rights. Thomas Jefferson, for example, who was the author of the draft Lockean section of the Declaration, followed his belief in the idea that all men equally had a right to self-government, coupled with his belief that white and black people could never live together peacefully as equal citizens in America, to the conclusion that blacks must be colonized abroad to someplace where they might exercise their right to self-government.

The fulfillment of the 4th of July will come when the United States has sponsored democratic revolutions throughout the world.

No. Both George Washington (in an address he co-wrote with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) and Thomas Jefferson counseled that the U.S. avoid foreign entanglements, and thus foreign wars.

As you observe, or perhaps participate in, 4th of July festivities this year, note the pervasiveness of these myths.