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Rothbard: The Free-Market and Anti-Government Roots of the American Revolution


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Rothbard: The Free-Market and Anti-Government Roots of the American Revolution

JULY 3, 2015Murray N. Rothbard

[From For a New Liberty.]

 

Historians have long debated the precise causes of the American Revolution: Were they constitutional, economic, political, or ideological? We now realize that, being libertarians, the revolutionaries saw no conflict between moral and political rights on the one hand and economic freedom on the other. On the contrary, they perceived civil and moral liberty, political independence, and the freedom to trade and produce as all part of one unblemished system, what Adam Smith was to call, in the same year that the Declaration of Independence was written, the "obvious and simple system of natural liberty." Scissors-32x32.png

 

The new federal government formed by the Articles of Confederation was not permitted to levy any taxes upon the public; and any fundamental extension of its powers required unanimous consent by every state government. Above all, the military and war-making power of the national government was hedged in by restraint and suspicion; for the eighteenth-century libertarians understood that war, standing armies, and militarism had long been the main method for aggrandizing State power. Scissors-32x32.png


https://mises.org/blog/rothbard-free-market-and-anti-government-roots-american-revolution

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