When It All Comes Crashing Down

Be it 1770s America or 21st century Australia, freedom-loving peoples will eventually rebel against excessive and iniquitous taxation, argues Sydney journalist Fred Pawle.

The slogan ‘taxation is theft’ appears repeatedly in Australian conservative forums and chat groups. Its subversive ring makes it stand out from the politeness otherwise generally characterising such discussions, which I assume gives the people who type it an added frisson of rebellious excitement. But the men who wrote the book on rebelling against taxation—the American revolutionaries of the 1770s—would scoff heartily at this supposedly defiant exclamation. To them, taxation was not mere theft. It was slavery.

“There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot to enslave all America”, wrote lawyer John Adams in 1765, 32 years before he became the second president of the United States. Adams was referring to the Stamp Act, a law passed by the British Parliament to impose fees on government documents and transactions in the American colonies. This new tax would be minuscule but ubiquitous, applying to leases, diplomas, mortgages, land grants, newspapers, lawsuits, and more. Adams’ main beef was that the tax was being imposed by a foreign Parliament in which the colonials had no direct representatives. “No taxation without representation” would later become central to the debate that sparked the American Revolution. A couple of years later, Pennsylvania lawyer and legislator John Dickinson wrote in a popular pamphlet distributed throughout the colonies that the Townshend Act, the successor to the Stamp Act, was the thin end of a tyrannical wedge:

Some person may think this act of no consequence, because the duties are so small. A fatal error. That is the very circumstance most alarming to me. For I am convinced, that the authors of this law would never have obtained an act to raise so trifling a sum as it must do, had they not intended by it to establish a precedent for future use … In short, if they have a right to levy a tax of one penny upon us, they have a right to levy a million upon us.

Thus began the movement that led not just to the American Revolution but, according to much scholarship on the period—which is brilliantly brought back to life in America’s Revolutionary Mind by political philosophy professor C. Bradley Thomson—it also spawned a new way of thinking for the civilised world, a way of thinking that, although waning, has yet to be superseded.

Australia’s baptism was relatively sedate.

For better and worse, Australia’s baptism, at roughly the same time, was relatively sedate. If anything defined our emergence into liberty, it was the emancipation of convicts who were then given a large plot of land and encouraged to fend for themselves. From that emerged our robust independence and laconic humour in the face of adversity, but it wasn’t a conscious thing.

In the absence of any explicit revolutionary moment (barring the Eureka Stockade in 1854, which was a legitimate rebellion against taxation but has now sadly been appropriated by the union movement for its own nefarious reasons), we have never needed to define exactly what we stand for, or what is at the foundation of Australian culture.

For most of our history, it was too obvious to require explanation: all we wanted was an affordable home within easy reach of a decent job, shops, schools and pub, and the option to move to a similar neighbourhood, but with harbour views, if we worked hard enough for it. That pretty much summed it up. This spawned a culture that valued individual sovereignty and was suspicious of officialdom.

Our continued ties to the monarchy gave the impression that we were also mostly British by nature. But Thompson’s book reveals that we owe as much, if not more, to that one moment when America’s Founding Fathers defined life at the height of the Enlightenment—the Declaration of Independence, specifically its assertions that all men are born equal and have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Australians gave Americans a good run for their money in the pursuit of happiness. We were prosperous, innovative, and good humoured. Australians who travelled the world in the latter part of the 20th century were welcomed almost everywhere they went, unburdened as Americans were by the new intellectual left’s sneers about American culture being crass and imperialistic. Paradoxically, our own crassness, as represented by comedians like Barry Humphries, became our most endearing and pronounced feature. Go figure.

But if our affinity with the founding principles and culture of the US was unconscious, so too has been our distancing from them. That Americans comprehensively voted to elect Donald Trump in November on a platform of radical tax reduction and the obliteration of superfluous government agencies (but I repeat myself) shows that the spirit of Dickinson, Adams, and the rest of the revolutionaries lives on in the US.

Australia is going in the opposite direction. The best and most egregious Australian equivalent of the ‘stamp’ tax that American colonials warned would increase ad infinitum is the tax that applies whenever we buy real estate. It is common to spend half a year’s wages for the privilege of having some lazy bureaucrat ‘stamp’ the transfer documents for an average family home. The consequences of this are incalculable. Want to sell your house and move to another neighbourhood or State to pursue a better job, education or lifestyle? No way, says the government, you have to pay us tens of thousands of dollars first. The revenue this raises is one thing, but the restrictions this places on the free movement of fellow citizens must give some occupiers of dreary government office cubicles a rare feeling of vindictive satisfaction.

That we are too complacent to descend on Canberra and our respective State capitals to resist the imposition of this and dozens of similar taxes is like George Washington refusing to cross the Delaware River because the water was too cold and he’d left his woollen socks at the farm. But it gets worse. When Adams equated taxation with slavery, he assumed the slaveowners were at least competent enough to run the plantation at a profit. Australian politicians cannot even do that. They are managing the modern equivalent of a southern cotton farm—a continent absolutely loaded with natural resources, and a population of compliant workers—and instead of sitting on the porch of the homestead benignly watching over us toiling away in the fields, they are setting fire to the crops, locking us in our homes, and threatening to jail anybody who dares point out that things are not exactly going swimmingly.

Before Trump was elected to the Presidency in November, the US appeared to be irreparably divided. The media exaggerated the number of people who supported the big-state Democrats, and caricatured their opponents as crazed fascists. Commentators occasionally fretted that a new civil war between these two irreconcilable sides was now a distinct possibility. The comprehensiveness of Trump’s win has shattered this illusion—the extent of Democrat support was as imaginary as the fascistic tendencies of their Republican opponents. Trump’s win has ruined the media’s forlorn desire—to which it clings merely by habit, to sell newspapers and airtime—to whip up more civil unrest like they did with BLM, Antifa, the Occupy movement, and the Los Angeles riots. The Trump win shows that the nation was not so divided or fascist after all. Moreover, his radical agenda is likely to usher in what looks like a peaceful revolution, if by ‘peaceful’ we mean we can ignore the shrieks of irredeemably woke women who think Trump is the new Hitler and blue-haired lesbians are the new Jews.

Does Australia need a similar revolution?

Does Australia need a similar revolution? And if so, can it be peaceful? Thompson’s book dedicates a chapter to the part of the Declaration of Independence that cannot be ignored by people who, as I believe Australians do, align with the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”: the right to revolt when governments go bad. The protocol behind this clause is both cautious and decisive. Thompson says:

There are times when exercising the right to revolution would be imprudent or foolish … Likewise, there are times when not exercising the right to revolution would be imprudent or foolish.

The former can be summarised as mere ‘mismanagement’. But he warns that the transition from mismanagement to the latter, despotism, can be “slow and sometimes unseen”. I would argue that the despotic intentions of the Australian political class passed the ‘unseen’ stage when both sides colluded to lock us down during the Covid ‘pandemic’, if not before. The lack of alarm from Canberra over our growing debt, crony capitalism, government corruption, uncontrolled immigration, bureaucratic obstructionism, and decreasing liberties, especially free speech, confirm we are witnessing what John Locke, whose writings were the main inspiration for the American Revolution, called a “long series of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way”, which “make the (tyrannical) design visible to the people”. That is when good citizens are morally impelled to reach for their weapons. Curiously, we Australians don’t have any.

Here is Locke’s key point: defending our freedoms and rising up against government overreach does not make us rebels—it makes us conservatives. Tyrannical politicians are the real rebels because they are the ones upsetting the natural order and rights of citizens.

The American Revolution did not happen overnight. The American Revolutionary Mind covers the 16 years to 1776, during which this new way of thinking evolved. Thompson alludes to the historical uniqueness of the time. In the early 18th century, American colonials started to adapt the rights they inherited as British citizens, going all the way back to the Magna Carta, into something entirely new: a system of rights derived not from precedent but from nature. This, combined with the subsequent creeping realisation that the British government was overstepping its authority, created fertile ground for the emergence of an entirely new philosophy, the first based on, according to Thomas Paine, the “indefeasible, hereditary Rights of Man”.

Thompson points out that the ‘self-evident’ nature of the truths mentioned in the Declaration does not mean they are immediately obvious. Rather, they will become self-evident to anybody who is free to follow reason and discourse. His book details that this took time, but eventually swept the colonies.

One consistent characteristic of the ensuing debate is its eloquence. These days, the most prominent social agitators are overpaid illiterate ‘artists’ shilling whatever superficially radical posture is approved by the corporate giants of the entertainment industry. So it is refreshing to read genuine iconoclasts arguing their case with reason while also quoting Virgil, Machiavelli, Newton, Paine, and Locke, among dozens of others, who not only had a specific and ambitious philosophical goal, but also the cojones to put down their pens and pick up pistols when push finally came to shove.

Without an inalienable right to freedom, nothing else mattered.

English statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke marvelled at what he called the American colonists’ “temper and character”. Their love of freedom was their predominating feature, Burke said, and they “become suspicious, restive, and intractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for”.

The American colonials were settling a new continent, and were naturally obsessed with the future. A confluence of circumstances helped them realise that the future would not evolve much beyond horse-drawn buggies and gasoline lamps if they did not first establish an inalienable right to freedom. Without it, nothing else mattered. We Australians are now living in that future, albeit on a different continent, and our world is freer, more prosperous, and more dazzling than could possibly have been imagined 248 years ago. But while the wealth and technological wizardry that we take for granted would impress the Founding Fathers if they were here to see it, they would also be alarmed that we are complacently oblivious to the legislation our governments routinely present to parliament that makes the Stamp and Townshend Acts look beneficent. The Declaration of Independence was not written for a unique time and place. It was conceived as universal. As Thompson writes:

Despite differences of time and space, geography, climate and culture, there was a common

human nature that was permanently fixed, and with a common nature there could be universal and eternal standards of moral action and justice.

If our governments won’t conform to those standards of moral action and justice, we, the people, will have to.

Fred Pawle is a Sydney-based journalist and television host, and the author of Die Laughing: The Biography Of Bill Leak (IPA, 2021).

This article from the Summer 2024 edition of the IPA Review is written by Sydney journalist Fred Pawle.