What If We Let Freedom Roll?

Shouldn't Independence Day mean more than just a day off work?

Independence Day (July 4th) is when many Americans fly the flag, take the kiddos to see local fireworks, and praise America as the greatest country that has existed in the annals of humankind or that ever will exist until the Sun burns out.

I enjoy holidays as much as anyone. They give me a respectable excuse to avoid working with a clear conscience. I especially LOVE lying in the sun in Alaska’s 22 hours of daylight. We don’t actually get to watch fireworks on July 4th because…well, you can’t see them in the daylight and our forests are always on the verge of burning down in the summer, so fireworks are both pointless and likely to cause mayhem.

Leisure is the time when we do things for their own sake rather than for the sake of something else, which didn’t set well with New England’s Puritan founders, who feared leisure as potentially the Devil’s Playground. H.L. Mencken later defined “puritanism” as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” The English historian T.B. Macaulay wrote something similar — “The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”

Nevertheless, even the most puritanical among us have enthusiastically embraced Independence Day as a time for pleasure. Cantankerous John Adams, a puritan in spirit if not in doctrine, believed Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

Adams’s hopeful prediction didn’t quite pan out. He expected Independence to be celebrated on July 2nd, the date when American Independence was officially proclaimed by the Second Continental Congress. John also didn’t anticipate that some of the festivities he recommended would later become illegal. Celebrate Independence Day with a gun in some parts of the United States and you might land in jail. If you want a bonfire or parade, you might need a special government permit. And depending on your state, the private use of fireworks (“illuminations”) might get you arrested. In Alaska, you might set your neighborhood on fire. Ironically, consumer fireworks are banned in Massachusetts, John’s beloved home state, so if he were alive today and wanted to follow his own advice, he would need to go elsewhere to celebrate freedom legally.

What are We Celebrating?

I’m a libertarian and every year, some friend in the movement asks what there is about Independence Day that libertarians should celebrate?

Well, let’s look at that.

Independence Day celebrates the formal separation of 13 American colonies from the British Empire. How does that explain the exuberance of our contemporary celebrations?

Supposedly, the separation was all about “No taxation without representation”--a slogan that has little meaning today and, contrary to popular opinion, was rarely if ever heard during protests against British measures.

Truthfully, “No taxation without representation” is misleading because it suggests the colonials would have agreed to be taxed if they could elect their own representatives to serve in the British Parliament. Virtually all radicals expressly repudiated that option. It’s simply untrue the colonials would have passively paid taxes if they’d only been authorized by their own legislatures.

“One suspects that ‘no taxation without representation’ meant no taxation with representation, either.” Robert Palmer, historian, The Age of the Democratic Revolution

According to Palmer, “British Americans enjoyed a lighter tax burden than [almost] any other people of the Western World.” Americans “paid no direct taxes, and not much in the way of customs duties, to the central government.” British Americans enjoyed many other freedoms as well, and this fact led some skeptics, including some modern historians, to question the motives of those Americans who fought against the British during the Revolution. Why would a people with so much freedom-​-​more freedom than found anywhere in Europe and more freedom, in certain crucial areas, than Americans enjoy today-​-​take up arms against a relatively benign government?

Thomas Paine addressed this issue in Letter to the Abbé Raynal (1782). Calling the Stamp Act (1765) “a slight tax upon the colonies,” Raynal admitted his puzzlement of why it provoked ferocious resistance in America. In his opinion, colonial America wasn’t ruled by an arbitrary power. “Morals there had not been insulted. Manners, customs, habits, no object dear to nations, had there been the sport of ridicule.”

Paine replied it wasn’t the amount of the Stamp Tax, large or small, that inspired widespread, violent resistance. Rather, Americans viewed the new tax as a dangerous precedent that would inevitably lead to greater taxes, so “it was necessary they should oppose it, in its first stage of execution.”

Paine also noted many Americans didn’t voice their opposition to the Stamp Act in terms of well-​reasoned general principles. There “were many, who, with best intentions, did not choose the best, nor indeed the true ground, to defend their cause upon. They felt themselves right by a general impulse, without being able to separate, and analyze, and arrange the parts.”

Paine’s reference to “a general impulse” is key to understanding the colonial mentality. Revolutionary Americans viscerally felt the inestimable value of individual freedom and the dangers of government power-​-​a feeling articulated in writing by Paine, Jefferson, Adams, and other libertarian authors. Without that fundamental, ingrained, and widespread sentiment of freedom, the writings of American revolutionaries would have had few if any practical consequences.

Mixed Bag

Have I explained what libertarians can find to celebrate in Independence Day? Yes and not really. Colonial America was far from perfect and some of it, like slavery, was downright ugly-​-​but the ideal of freedom, however compromised in practice, was sincerely believed, felt, and acted upon by a significant portion of the population. The ideal of individual freedom is more than a foggy vapor. In the past, it was widely appreciated.

Can it be widely appreciated in the future?

Because if it’s just all about the flash and bang and not about current and future freedom, what is the point of Independence Day?

I think our past is a cause for hope in a less-than-free time, a lighthouse that can lead us to a freer future if we can keep from being distracted by the fireworks long enough to ask ourselves — are we still free, and are we as free as our Founders meant us to be?

Because if we aren’t celebraing our own freedom, we shouldn’t be celebrating Independence Day.