10 Responses to ANTI-AMERICAN

  1. Louis Robinson says:
    October 27, 2011 at 12:12 am

    “On Tuesday night, while Republican candidates in Nevada were debating such American issues as nuclear waste disposal and the immigration status of Mitt Romney’s gardener, American and British lawyers in Philadelphia were taking on a far more fundamental topic.” Is the American Declaration of Independence illegal…while I was at home cutting my toenails. Relevant? By BBC standards, yes.

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    • David Preiser (USA) says:
      October 27, 2011 at 3:27 am

      The comparison to Ireland is idiotic.  If they want to compare like with like, then – and this is still a bit of a stretch – compare the English takeover of Ireland with the various European takeovers of the native tribal peoples during the Colonial Era.  The Colonists were Englishmen and free men from other European countries who decided to break away from the unfair system (the revolutionary comrades at the BBC usually love that sort of thing, no?), not an indigenous population with their own culture and language and history who had been conquered.

      Anything to get a dig in at a pet issue, I guess.

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  2. Grant says:
    October 27, 2011 at 7:46 am

    If the USA is still part of the UK does it mean we are all responsible for each others debts ?

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  3. Umbongo says:
    October 27, 2011 at 9:56 am

    As David Preiser writes, the American War is something you would expect the BBC to cheer on.  Unfortunately for the narrative (and there were other reasons for discontent) the colonials started out simply wanting representation (in Parliament) in return for taxation.  This wasn’t – again as DP notes – a prototype for a 20th century anti-colonial war.

    Independence was not a high priority at the start of the problem.  Indeed the colonials merely wanted their rights as Englishmen – or Britons (who were not, I should add, faux-“Britons” of the type who’ve been here for 2 minutes and described as such by the BBC to avoid a more informative description) confirmed under what they understood as the English constitution.  Had this been done, the history of the world would have been very different.

    I must say though that IMHO asking the colonials to contribute to their defence was not unreasonable.  What was unreasonable was to impose taxation from Westminster where the colonials had no elected representative voice and, further, to impose restrictions on international trade the consequences of which were suffered disportionately by the colonials.

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    • David Preiser (USA) says:
      October 27, 2011 at 1:20 pm

      The Stamp Act in particular was a bad move because it hurt local business, particularly the businesses certain Revolutionary figures were in.  Does that sound familiar?

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      • Umbongo says:
        October 27, 2011 at 1:50 pm

        The colonials were (and present-day Americans are), I think, more assertive than Brits now since some of them were descended from (or many admire) the original awkward squad: the Pilgrim Fathers.  Also the leaders of the American Revolution would have been – had they lived in the UK – part of the stratum of society which was passing or influencing the legislation which so upset them.  So two strikes against British policy: 1. irritating the colonial “political class” (which was a mirror image of the same class in the UK) and 2. passing stupid laws which were bound to upset those who were subject to them.

        BTW one of the advantages accruing from that history occurred just yesterday.  Part of a transaction a client is undertaking involves the transfer of stock in a Delaware corporation.  This is not a particularly complicated part of the transaction but it’s made even less complicated (and less expensive) because of the absence (AFAIAA) of stamp duty in the US.  Getting a rise out of my Delaware attorney, I asked him when Delaware or the Feds would assess the stamp duty on the transfer.  He barked down the phone that one of the few positive things my ancestors had achieved (albeit unintentionally) for the US was to get that particular issue out of the way over 200 years ago.

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        • David Preiser (USA) says:
          October 27, 2011 at 2:12 pm

          Nice one, Umbongo. Many of the original instigators were land owners and businessmen (like printers and lawyers, who were hurt most by the Stamp Act), the kind of people with something to lose and the means with which to defend it. Fortunately, just because of geography, most of them grew up with a different sense of freedom than if they had been raised in Britain.

          BTW, you’re probably aware but others may not be, Deleware has a very light tax scheme for corporations, and a very straightforward business court system, which is why so many credit card and insurance companies and other types of companies are incorporated (albeit don’t necessarily have their home office) there.  One of the best unintentional consequences of your ancestors’ actions is that states get to decide that stuff for themselves.

          Sadly, there’s another kind of government act which does give the federal government too much control over business: the Commerce Clause.  Whenever the politicians overreach with it, the result is usually harmful.

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  4. Derek Buxton says:
    October 27, 2011 at 12:01 pm

    Funny they should bring this up, I wish we could get tht simple fact through to our Government.  That is, “no tax without representation”.  Our own representatives, MPs, big laugh, claim when challenged that they are not such, and of course we have no representatives in the EU parliament at all, or the EU  for that matter, but the b*****ds still steal our money.

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  5. Joe Geary says:
    October 27, 2011 at 10:17 pm

    According to the Beeb, it was all the fault of the Tea Party, like everything else.

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