It wasn't a “Gilded Age” of "Robber Barons." It was The Inventive Period

The so-called “Gilded Age” of "Robber Barons" should be better named, says Andrew Bernstein in this guest post. It should be known as the Inventive Period of Capitalism.

The Inventive Period

by Andrew Bernstein

A recent issue of American Heritage magazine, devoted to analysing important cultural issues in U.S. history, contains an article that provides ample clues to the true nature of late nineteenth-century America. The piece, “People of Progress,” features the greatest innovators of the twentieth century, and takes as its point of departure Christian Schussele’s famed 1862 painting, “Men of Progress,” a depiction of 19 great American inventors and creative thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Schussele’s painting portrays such men as Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884), the inventor and manufacturer of the reaping machine and other agricultural equipment; Charles Goodyear (1800-1860), who created the vulcanization process that made rubber useful; Samuel Colt (1814-1862), the gun inventor and manufacturer; Peter Cooper (1791-1883), the builder of the first American steam locomotive; Samuel Morse (1791-1872), the innovative thinker responsible for both the electric telegraph and the Morse Code; William Morton (1819-1868), the dentist who co-discovered ether’s use as an anesthetic; and Elias Howe (1819-1867), inventor of the sewing machine. These, as well as 12 other equally accomplished thinkers and inventors, form the subject of Schussele’s masterpiece.

The administrators of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (founded by industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper in 18591) recently commissioned one of its leading graduates, the artist Edward Sorel, to paint a sequel to Schussele’s work—a portrait of 20 innovative Americans who changed the world in the twentieth century. Sorel, with assistance from the editors of American Heritage and American Heritage of Invention & Technology, chose the subjects. And not surprisingly, some of the geniuses depicted started their brilliant careers in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Anti-capitalist historians regularly refer to this late-nineteenth-century era as “the Gilded Age” and deride its great industrialists as “Robber Barons.” They claim that its extensive industrial development was achieved by means essentially tawdry and unprincipled. They are profoundly mistaken and have failed to identify the essence of the era. It must be known as the Inventive Period.

In Schussele’s painting, Benjamin Franklin looks down on those assembled as both inspiration and presiding genius. Sorel grants this honor to Thomas Edison. Edison (1847-1931) is the exemplar of his age. He is widely known as the inventor of the electrical lighting system, the phonograph, the electric generator, and the motion-picture projector. He also later coordinated movies with phonographic sound to create the world’s first multi-media presentation. But Edison is by no means alone in exemplifying the scientific/technological genius of the period. Sorel’s portrait projects numerous other great minds.

Among them are George Washington Carver (1864-1943), the brilliant black American botanist and agronomist, who developed a new type of cotton, Carver’s Hybrid. Born a slave, he is most famous for developing sweet potatoes and peanuts as leading crops, but he also invented hundreds of plant-based products, taught methods of soil improvement and, by means of his discoveries, induced southern farmers to grow crops other than cotton. Also included is Charles Steinmetz (1865-1923), the German immigrant who went to work for General Electric as its first director of research and development and in the 1890s pioneered the understanding of electrical transmission.

Neglected Geniuses

Since Schussele’s portrait concentrates on the early nineteenth century and Sorel’s on the twentieth, there are many great late-nineteenth-century thinkers who are included in neither painting. Here we can cite merely a few. One is George Eastman (1854-1932), who in 1884 patented the first film in roll form to prove practical. In 1888 he revolutionized photography by perfecting his Kodak camera, and in 1892 established the Eastman-Kodak Company, one of the first to mass-produce standardized photographic equipment. Another is Cyrus W. Field (1819-1892), an entrepreneur whose interest in transoceanic telegraphy led to the completion in 1866 of the transatlantic cable. Field later was instrumental in laying the cable that linked the United States to Australia and Asia by way of Hawaii.

The advances in architecture wrought by William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907) and Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) must not be overlooked. Jenney, an engineer in the Union Army during the Civil War, settled in Chicago and opened an architectural office. He pioneered the use of iron-frame construction for large buildings, which he first employed in the Home Insurance Company Building in 1885. His revolutionary method of curtain-wall construction is still used today and earned him the title of “father of the skyscraper.” Sullivan apprenticed with Jenney early in his career. Later, it was his designs for steel-frame buildings that resulted in the establishment of the skyscraper as a distinctively American type of building.

George Westinghouse (1846-1914) introduced numerous inventions in various fields, but concentrated on the railroad industry. Before the age of 20, he created the “railroad frog,” an invention that permitted trains to switch tracks. His most famous advance was the air brake, invented around 1866, which became a standard feature on all trains. Westinghouse developed hundreds of innovations, acquired more than 400 patents and, together with the Croatian immigrant Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), pioneered the use of alternating current (AC) power in the United States. Tesla invented the AC induction generator in the 1880s, the first practical motor powered by alternating current. He sold the patent to Westinghouse, who put it to commercial use in the Niagara Falls power project. Westinghouse and Tesla demonstrated that alternating current was able to generate electrical power over great distances more economically than the direct current favoured by Edison.

John Roebling (1806-1869), a German immigrant, pioneered the construction of suspension bridges in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. He demonstrated the practicality of using steel cables in bridge construction—and today, early in the 21st century, several of his bridges still stand, including the famed Brooklyn Bridge in New York, constructed in the 1870s. Another great creator, largely forgotten today, is the U.S. Army surgeon and bacteriologist Walter Reed (1851-1902). In the 1890s, Reed’s investigations contributed greatly to the understanding of typhoid fever, leading to the control and prevention of epidemics of the disease. In 1900 Reed demonstrated that the yellow-fever virus was transmitted by the bite of the mosquito Aedes aegypti. By exterminating the mosquitoes, the disease was virtually wiped out.

A great thinker from the Inventive Period who is widely remembered is the Scottish immigrant, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). In 1874, his work on the multiple telegraph gave him the idea for the telephone. Experiments with his research assistant, Thomas Watson, proved successful on March 10, 1876. Later that year, Bell demonstrated the telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, an event leading to the organization of the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Bell’s other inventions include the audiometer, a device for measuring hearing acuity and, later in life, the aileron and other aeronautical advances.

Space does not permit even the mention of all the inventors, entrepreneurs, and groundbreaking industrialists who flourished during the period. The achievements of Frank Julian Sprague (1857-1934), for example, are no longer remembered. Sprague, a brilliant electrical engineer who graduated from Annapolis and worked for Edison, electrified Richmond’s trolley system in 1888. He demonstrated that electricity was cheap, and that it could be used on both surface and elevated cars. In 1890 about 15 percent of America’s urban transit mileage was electrified; by 1902, 97 percent.

On the eve of the twentieth century America’s technological advances were only beginning. On the morning of June 4, 1896, Henry Ford (1863-1947) battered down the brick wall of his rented garage with an ax and drove out his first car. Others, of course, had already built and run cars, but Ford began the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and made the automobile a commercial reality. Soon millions of Americans were driving cars. That same year, Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, who were self-educated regarding the principles of aeronautical engineering, accomplished the first controlled, powered flight of a heavier-than-air vehicle at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Throughout the 1890s, the Wrights had been studying aeronautics and experimenting with flying devices. Both the automotive and aviation ages dawned in early twentieth-century America as a direct outgrowth of the achievements of the late nineteenth. (Ford and the Wright brothers are included in Sorel’s painting.)

The Underlying Factor

What underlying factor was responsible for this unprecedented outpouring of innovations, inventions, advances, and new products? The answer should be obvious, but unfortunately, to many historians it is not. It was the political and economic freedom of the capitalist system that enabled these inventor-entrepreneurs to flourish.

The late nineteenth century (until the proliferation of trust-busting and government controls in the early twentieth century) was the freest period of American history. The leading economists, professors, legal theorists, and judges upheld the principles of individual rights, limited government, economic freedom, and profit-making. Economists such as Amasa Walker, Arthur Latham Perry, and Francis Bowen wrote the leading economics textbooks of the day. Their works—Science of Wealth, Elements of Political Economy, and American Political Economy, respectively—championed the ability of the free market to create wealth and upward economic mobility.2 William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), the leading American social scientist of the late nineteenth century, wrote of “The Forgotten Man,” the honest labourer who supported himself by productive work. The principle of the Forgotten Man is that he needs the liberty of the American system if he is to flourish. He is the one always victimised by the socialists’ schemes to redistribute the income earned by private individuals.3

The law writers and legal philosophers of the day shared the same commitment to limited government. The most prominent, Thomas Cooley and Christopher Tiedeman, wrote their major works in the second half of the nineteenth century. The upshot of both Cooley’s A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Powers of the American Union (1868) and Tiedeman’s A Treatise on the Limitations of the Police Powers of the States(1886) was the defense of property rights.4

In practice, most American judges of the period agreed with the individualistic principles of the country’s leading legal philosophers. After the Civil War, American courts generally presumed to be unconstitutional any laws restricting property rights and the rights of both businessmen and workers to set the terms of labor that they deemed best. As one example, the New York State Court of Appeals in 1885 struck down legislation seeking to limit the hours of industrial employment, ruling that such a law violated the rights of both worker and employer to engage in a voluntary transaction.

Additionally, the American courts of the late nineteenth century repeatedly placed severe limitations on the government’s power to tax and to subsidize business ventures. The courts generally gave strong support to the capitalist principle that productive enterprise was to be privately funded, owned, and operated. One representative ruling by a Missouri court in 1898 found against governmental paternalism, whether state or federal, and proclaimed that individuals know best how to conduct their own business and personal affairs.5

In this era, the U.S. Supreme Court gradually came to be the great defender of an individual’s right to property, freedom of contract, and economic liberty. For example, Stephen J. Field (brother of Cyrus Field), for many years a distinguished Justice of the high court, issued pro-freedom dissenting opinions in such famous disputes as the Slaughter-House cases (1873) and Munn v. Illinois (1877), holding that the government could prevent neither employers nor workers from entering fields of their own choosing or violate the right of individuals to the full use and disposal of their property. The majority opinion at this time was that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the rights of the recently freed slaves only and that there was nothing in it to prevent the states from interfering in business activities. But by the mid-1880s, after the San Mateo case (1882) and the Santa Clara case (1886), Justice Field prevailed. Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite, in an oral statement, spoke for a unanimous bench in 1886, proclaiming that all the justices “understood and accepted the fact that corporations were persons within the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The right of individuals to work and to use their own labor and property as they saw fit now came under the legal protection of the Supreme Court.6

Religion and Capitalism

Religious leaders of the period characteristically upheld the virtues of work, frugality, sobriety, and wealth earned through honest effort. The weekly religious periodical The Independent, edited for a while by the noted Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), defended the free market as the means by which both capitalists and workers would achieve material gain. For almost four decades Beecher preached from his influential Brooklyn pulpit the ability of hard-working individuals to rise economically in the capitalist system.7

The intellectual, cultural and political climate of the country upheld freedom, limited government, and property rights in this era. The economic results are not surprising. The most innovative and creative minds were free to develop new products and methods, to start their own companies, to bring their innovations to the marketplace, to convince consumers that the new products were superior to the old and, in time, to earn fortunes. There were few government bureaucrats and regulators to prohibit their activities, restrict their output, dictate working conditions, or limit their market share. “The first condition of this proliferation was that the innovations did not require the assent of governmental . . . authorities.”8

Most of the innovators of the Inventive Period were entrepreneurs who sought and made wealth by virtue of their creative work. Edison retired with a net worth of $12 million, an enormous sum in those days. His inventions were profit-driven. “Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory was conceived to bring scientific knowledge to bear on industrial innovation . . . . Its inventions were goals chosen with a careful eye to their marketability.”9

Such instances were numerous during the Inventive Period. Eastman, Westinghouse (Westinghouse Electric Company), and Ford are all examples of innovator-entrepreneurs who developed their new products into profitable business ventures. Willis Carrier (1876-1950) invented the air conditioner in 1902, held more than 80 patents by the 1940s, and founded the manufacturing firm that bears his name. (He also made Sorel’s painting.) Bell’s most famous invention led, of course, to the founding of the Bell Telephone Company. Roebling made a fortune from his wire-manufacturing company, as did McCormick from his firm’s producing the reaping machine and other farm equipment. Colt was an entrepreneur who opened his own plant, Colt Patent Arms, in 1855. He pioneered advanced manufacturing methods such as the production line and the use of interchangeable parts, making his company the largest private armory in the world. Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-1875) wanted a commercially practical sewing machine and brought together several related patents to create his immensely popular product. By 1860, he was the largest manufacturer of sewing machines in the world. A business innovator, Singer began such practices as installment buying, advertising campaigns, and service with sales.

Because of the climate of political and economic freedom during the Inventive Period, America’s entrepreneurs were able to revolutionise the fields of heavy industry on which general prosperity depended. Between 1860 and 1900, American output of bituminous coal increased by 2,260 percent, crude petroleum by 9,060 percent, steel by 10,190 percent, and other industries increased by similar amounts.10 Industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) and John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) built Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil into enormously productive concerns that flooded the country with steel and oil products. In the 1880s and 1890s, the great railroad man James J. Hill (1838-1916) constructed the Great Northern Railroad with only private funds to the immense betterment of people in the northern plains and northwest states. It goes without saying that Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Hill earned great wealth.

The lesson of the Inventive Period can be applied today. Political and economic freedom will lead to widespread innovation. This principle can already be seen in the computer industry, in which the relative absence of government regulation has enabled such innovators as Steve Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and others to create an information revolution, and to earn fortunes in the process.

To defend freedom against the distortions of the anti-capitalist historians it is important to reject the inaccurate and opprobrious title of “the Gilded Age” for the late nineteenth century. We must recognise and celebrate the true nature of the era.

It was the Inventive Period.

Notes

See www.cooper.edu/engineering/chemechem/general/cooper.html.
Louis M. Hacker, The World of Andrew Carnegie, 1865-1901 (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1968), pp. 68-73.
Ibid., pp. 81-85.
Ibid., pp. 86-92.
Ibid., pp. 95-96.
Ibid., pp. 98-107.
Ibid., pp. 74-80.
Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 265.
Ibid., p. 250.
Hacker, p. xxxi

* * * * 

Andrew Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the City University of New York. He lectures all over the world. His books include The Capitalist Manifesto, American Racism: Its Decline, Its Baleful Resurgence, and Our Looming Race War, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters, and his newly-released (and highly recommended) collection of essays Aristotle Versus Religion.

Lessons in Collaboration #124

"We are involved in a business venture. We screened the film for you to bring you up to date as to the status of that venture. Do not misconstrue this as our soliciting the input of raging primitives."

~ director Mel Brooks, explaining the fine points of artistic collaboration ...

Seems fair

"Given that level of unprecedented upheaval and restriction on personal freedom – greater even than wartime – which people went along with because they believed it was for the greater good [sic], it is now far from unreasonable for New Zealanders to expect Ardern, Hipkins and Bloomfield to appear before the Royal Commission to explain their actions in a way that they would not and could not do at the time.
    "Only then will the Royal Commission be sufficiently informed to report on 'lessons to be learned from what happened'.” 

~ Peter Dunne from his untitled post [hat tip Home Paddock]

Rocketing rates rises rightly reviled

"Look at me, I'm on a bus!" Second-prize winner in the "my council spends too much awards,"
Greater Wellington's spender-in-chief Daran Ponter unfortunately ignores the exits.

BY HOW MUCH HAVE YOUR rates gone up by this year?

If you're "lucky," they've only risen by under 3 percent — that's if you're under the regime of either the Whanganui or Waitomo District Councils, or the Bay of Plenty Regional Council. You, dear people, are the "lucky" ones. Only a 3-percent rates rise

Not so lucky however if you live under the arm of the Clutha District Council, Upper Hutt City Council, Waipa District Council, Hamilton City Council, or Hastings District Council. If you're unlucky enough to have those folk on the letterhead of your. rates bill, then you're forced to pay more than 15 percent more this year than last year.

And pity those poor folk in Hastings.  Over the last three years, under Mayor/Chair Sandra Hazlehurst, their rates demands have gone up by just under 50 percent. Fifty percent in three years! And there are four councils demanding even more over these last three years — West Coast Regional Council demanding 66 percent more than they did in 2022, and Greater Wellington 55 percent more.

Well, I guess Wellington does need to fix its pipes, right?

But here's the problem. Those rocketing rates rises haven't been going to fix the pipes, have they. Like every other council ni the country, the Greater Wellington Regional Council has found what its politicians and planners think are far more important things on which to spend your money.

Monuments. Landscaping.

Bread. Circuses. Consultants.

Overseas trips.

All paid for from your rates, which also pay (almost) for their hefty borrowing. 

You can find all these frightening figures at the Taxpayer Union's Rates Dashboard 2025, released today.

>> CHECK IT OUT

THE FIGURES ARE FRIGHTENING. BUT they still don't reveal the whole truth.  'Cos even with rates rocketing, these profligate bastards still can't pay their way. They're not just over-spending, they're over-borrowing.

At least 11 councils have net debt-to-revenue ratios of more than 200 percent.

Hamilton is on 281 percent, just four points away from the limit on councils’ debt covenants. Queenstown Lakes is on 265 percent. Tauranga is on 248 percent now, but forecasting to blow the 285 percent lid from 2030 onwards.

“Some are reaching their debt ceilings, which will have the auditors in a twist,” says [Greater Wellington's Spender-in-Chief Daran] Ponter. “That’s a real issue. If you look to the UK, Birmingham has effectively gone into liquidation in the last few weeks. There’s a city of two to three million people that basically can’t pay its way anymore.”

Hamilton’s mayor Paula Southgate [42% rates rises over three years]and Local Government NZ vice president Campbell Barry, who is the Hutt City mayor [45% over three years], today published research showing the wide gap between council revenues and capital spending obligations, over the 10 years of the new longterm plans.

The research, by Infometrics, shows councils had already committed to $23.3 billion capital investment from 2021 to 2024. Infometrics principal economist Brad Olsen says once construction inflation is added in, that’s nearly $3 billion more.

It's all very well for Nicola Willis to say she wants councils to "stick to the basics" and "not waste ratepayers money" — "focusing on the things people expect them to do, which is the rubbish, the roads, the pipes, the basics - and not all the fanciful projects" — but she is doing damn all about it.

It's just more politico-blather.

Sandra Lee, 2002: Let's get councils
spending more, and doing less core

Nicola Willis is Finance Minister. She should have a good talk to her hopeless Local Government Minister Simon Watts about repealing the one Act that gave explicit permission for councils to begin focussing on all the fanciful projects, and to ignore the things people expect them to do, such as the rubbish, the roads, the pipes, the basics ...

That Act was the Local Government Act, which receives far less opprobrium than it should.

JUST OVER TWO DECADES AGO, in 2002, the then-Local Government Minister was the hard-left Alliance Party's Sandra Lee. And it was then that local government debt began to rise dramatically — not because councils around the country were over-investing in infrastructure; not because they were going hard on their core business; not at all because they were building, maintaining and upgrading roads, bye-roads, drains, pipes and parks as they were damned well supposed to. For the most part, instead, with some significant exceptions, they weren't. What they began building instead was a lot of expensive fucking monuments. 

Monuments mostly to themselves.

The culprit here was Sandra Lee's Local Government Amendment Act 2002, which granted to city councils, district councils and regional councils a "power of general competence" (I know, right?) which would enable them to enter into any activity they wished, with the only limit being their imagination and the pockets of their ratepayers.

Prior to Sandra Lee's Local Government Act, councils could only do what they were legally permitted to to, i.e., to carry out their core business. After Sandra Lee's Local Government Act, however, the leash was off. And council credit cards started straight away racking up debt for vanity projects everywhere. 

I'd like to say I told you so. I'd like to, so I will. Because I was as outraged then as I am now:

Libertarianz Leader Peter Cresswell is outraged at today's announcement by Helen Clark and Minister of Local Government Sandra Lee to grant local authorities "a power of general competence" in order to "enhance the well-being of their communities." "The well being of everyone in a community is more likely to be enhanced by retaining a tight leash on councils," says Cresswell, "since most councils have already well demonstrated they struggle for competence."
    "Local government throughout New Zealand's history has demonstrated its utter incompetence in handling the loot they confiscate from ratepayers by wasting it on such idiocies as the New Plymouth Wind Wand, the Auckland Britomart edifice, and the Palmerston North empty civic building." he said. ...
    "More substantially," says Cresswell, "there is a crucial constitutional principle at stake -the constitutional principle that citizens may do whatever they wish, apart from what is specifically outlawed, whereas governments and councils may only do what is specifically legislated for. The main purpose of this constitutional principle is to keep a leash on government, both central and local. It is this leash that is beginning to gnaw at local governments, and it is this leash that Clark and Lee propose to untie."
    "It is a dangerous step to take," warns Cresswell, who points out that councils are being given more 'freedom' at he same time as the Resource Management Amendments Bill threatens to take away even more freedom from New Zealand property owners. "The constitutional principle is being reversed," he says. "Even as they propose giving local government wider powers to act, they are taking away the power of individuals to act for themselves," says Cresswell. "Every property owner should rise up in protest," he says.
    "Libertarianz will be making a strong submission on the consultation document," says Cresswell. 

Which we did. For all the bloody use that it did: The Clark Government passed it, a succession of Local Government ministers since since has kept it, and every bloody local councillor ever since Sandra's "permissive" Act has spent like a drunken sailor on shore leave with a start-up founder's credit card.

The New Zealand Local Government Funding Agency (LGFA) supplies around two-thirds of that council debt, and last time I looked their tab was just over $18 billion. That's about $20,000 for every ratepayer. Add to that an existing $5 billion of Auckland and Christchurch council debt. And those numbers are every year by around a billion a year as ballooning rates rises fail to keep up with even-more ballooning council spending.

And as you can now see, it's not like they've been spending much of it underground.

In Christchurch they've been turning the city into "an innovative and modern community with major facilities from Akaroa Wharf to Te Kaha Canterbury Multi-Use Arena." In Wellington they've been watching the city's infrastructure crumble while they vote to spend hundreds of millions on earthquake-prone inner-city monuments of questionable value. And here in Auckland, council have allocated yet another billion dollars (plus fuck-ups) to pour down the ever-expanding black hole of the train set with the ever-disappearing-opening date, plus several hundreds of millions more to continue transforming the place into "one of the world's most liveable cities."

A shame there are still very few plans to make it an affordable one.

What on earth is to be done?

You know, here's an idea.

Instead of keeping Sandra Lee's Local Government Act and binning Three Waters, which is where this new Coalition Government went, how's about — and hear me out, now that you've all heard the story —how's about we bin Sandra Lee's act and tell fucking councils to stop over-spending, to close down their PR departments, and to get back to their core fucking business.

Maybe you could suggest something like that to Simon Watts, who's the current Local Government minister. 

But you'll have to explain to him first who Sandra Lee is, and what she did back then to stuff things up. Because the gormless twit does appear a bit simple.

UPDATE: It's been pointed out to me that Simon Watts is trying to overturn some of Sandra Lee's Act, and argued that I've been unnecessarily harsh about him in my conclusion.

Nearly two years into his job, he is introducing an Act he says will "refocus" councils to their core jobs.

. . . .

 . . . .

. . . .

Unfortunately, however, while this is good as far as it goes, it's the Act from way back in 2002 that still needs a bullet.

This is horrifying

[Hat tip Charted Daily]

20 years after 7/7

UPDATE, 14/7: 

"Have we learned the lessons of 7/7? So begins every trite radio and TV discussion today as we mark 20 years since four homegrown jihadists blew themselves up on London’s transport network and took 52 innocent souls with them.
    "Going by much of the commentary, you’d think this was a purely logistical, security question. There’s a long piece on the BBC website, talking about how the police and the security services were forced to up their game after the London Bombings, the new powers they now enjoy as a consequence, the attendant concerns over civil liberties, etc.
    "The words ‘Islamist’ and ‘jihadist’ do not appear once in the piece, even as it details the evolving ‘extremist’ threat posed first by al-Qaeda and then the ‘self-styled Islamic State’. There is often a stubborn refusal, a stammering hesitation, to mention what flavour of ‘extremism’ most menaces us – a cowardly tic that was skewered best by Morrissey: ‘An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?’
    "This attempt to brush over the I-word – to blithely ignore the religious, ideological character of those hellish bombings two decades ago – is everywhere today. The deadliest terror attack on UK soil since Lockerbie – the deadliest terror attack on London ever – is being talked about as if it were motivated by some vaguely defined form of ‘hate’ or ‘division’, rather than a global Islamist movement."

~ Tom Slater from his post '7/7 and the refusal to confront Islamist terror'

"'Business as usual.' That was the phrase of stoic courage made famous in the London blitz, and 

typified in the photo to the right. 'Business as usual' is the quiet bravery of offering two fingers to 

aggressors who simply do not understand what makes human life sacred, and human effort valuable.

"The main reason so many people fear Islam is all the terrorism carried out by Muslims. The London bombings of twenty years ago are but one entry in a long, long list. Muslims are much more prone to commit acts of terrorism than any other group in the world. This has been true for forty years.

"No, this does not mean that all or most Muslims are terrorists. As I have often said, some of the bravest people in the world are Muslims who know that the terrorists can find them and their families and fight them anyway.

"No, this does not mean it is decent behaviour to buttonhole your Muslim work colleague and harangue him or her for the crimes of their co-religionists.

"It does mean that unless and until the Muslim world confronts the fact that most terrorism is Islamic terrorism, the non-Muslim world is rational to view Muslims with extra suspicion and to discriminate against them in matters of security. The idealistic refusal of the Western part of the non-Islamic world (or rather its political class) to do this is folly, a folly that will eventually backfire on Muslims living in the West.

~ Natalie Solent from her post 'The main reason so many people fear Islam'

"Clearly 'the whole of Islam' did not bomb London, or Madrid, or Istanbul, or Jakarta, or Bali, or New York. But there is a world-wide trend there, don't you think, that we should not ignore. One that needs to be taken seriously, that needs to be condemned.

"The culture of Islam fundamentalism needs to be condemned, as I argued here briefly just the other day before all this happened, and here some weeks ago. ...

"But it's not enough to just condemn it. Islam must be reformed, and the hate-success, clitorectomies-for-everybody, kill-the-west culture that has fomented nothing but hatred and poverty across the Muslim world firmly rejected. Witness the effect that the sisters of Robert McCartney had in speaking out against Irish violence — by saying "NO MORE!" they brought the hope of ending what once seemed un-ending. Only a like rejection from within is ever going to change the culture of Islam.

"Second, Islam needs a Reformation. Urgently. As I pointed out here and here four years ago to noisy dissent, unlike the West, Islam never had a Reformation, and 1.4 billion Muslims and at least 750 Londoners are the poorer for that today. Islam never had a Renaissance. It never had an Aquinas to liberate science, thought and life from its religious shackles. Crikey, Islam doesn't even have a New Testament saying that all the God-awful and God-ordained killing in that earlier collection of papyrus is no longer necessary. Islamic culture needs to embrace Enlightenment values, and it needs to do so damn quickly.

"It needs its own McCartney sisters and its own Aquinas. Until it gets them the culture stands condemned, with smoking ruins and a trail of corpses across the west as sad monuments to its destructive power."

~ Me from my post 'Condemning a Culture'

"The Islamic terrorists who commit these atrocities are not the poor or downtrodden of the Muslim world, they are its best and brightest. What sort of culture has its best and brightest commit multiple murder, while its poor and downtrodden flee (when they can) to find a better life.

"Freedom's enemies have many faces, but one fundamental evil: hatred of the good for being the good. The lietmotif of nihilist hatred is a "radical rejection of the good, absolutely and in principle; rejection of what is good by any standard and by all standards, rejection of good as such. The emotional expression of nihilism is 'hatred of the good for being the good'."

~ Me from my post 'Business As Usual'

"Good guys can't believe nihilism. They can't imagine that anyone could accept nihilism, let alone try to practice nihilism, let alone cultivate in himself a hatred of the good. The good guys' naiveté on this point is their main strategic weakness: how do you fight enemies you can't even believe exist?"

~ Michael Miller from his post 'Nihilist Mutants'

• "Londoners are so wonderfully calm under this sort of pressure. Grace under pressure.
• "52 people killed. 700 injured. I hope some of those killed were the perpetrators.
• "London stock exchange down, and then straight back up again. Business as usual.
• "Given the planning that this attack displays, the good news is the relatively low loss of life. Despite the easy, soft targets they chose to rip apart with their explosives, it seems the cowardly, destructive fuckers were unable to acquire the materiel to kill and destroy at the level of Madrid, New York or Bali, or the coordination to kill on an even greater scale. Is that some sort of blessing? Are these people weaker in their destructive powere than we give them credit for?
• At times like these, isn't it a reminder that (despite their mixed premises and many political differences between us—and with significant low-life exceptions such as George Galloway and Keith Locke) western people and politicians actually share more than we differ. Tony Blair's words at midday London time could hardly be bettered: "It is important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world. Whatever they do, it is our determination they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations around the world.”
• The solidarity shown by western leaders at Gleneagles was something to see. Thirteen leaders including Jacques Chirac, George Bush, Kofi Annan and [even] Vladimir Putin stood shoulder-to-shoulder on stage behind Tony Blair has he decried the outrage, and promised to defend our values. I hope they mean it.
• Once again we see the lesson that you can not kill terrorism, you can only choke off its means of supply by hunting down those who support them and give them succour. At times such as these it becomes even more important that those who value human life and the ideas that support life do make a stand for the values of liberty and freedom.
• Those people that commit these atrocities and those who support them have exactly nothing to offer us except bloodshed , tears and death. Nothing."

~ Me from my post 'Grace Under Pressure' 

"Many years ago I was working in The City [of London] and there were two events that made travel into work almost impossible.

"The first was a series of storms that brought down power lines, blocked train routes and so on. Not surprisingly, the place was empty the next day. Why bother to struggle through?

"The other event was an IRA bomb which caused massive damage and loss of life. Trains were disrupted, travel to work the next day was horribly difficult and yet there were more people at work than on a normal day. There was no co-ordination to this, no instructions went out, but it appeared that people were crawling off their sick beds in order to be there at work the next day, thrusting their mewling and pewling infants into the arms of anyone at all so that they could be there.

"Yes, we’ll take an excuse for a day off, throw a sickie. But you threaten us, try to kill us? Kill and injure some of us?

"'Fuck you, sunshine.

"'We’ll not be having that. '

"No grand demonstrations, few warlike chants, a desire for revenge, of course, but the reaction of the average man and woman in the street? Yes, you’ve tried it now bugger off. We’re not scared, no, you won’t change us. Even if we are scared, you can still bugger off."

~ Tim Worstall from his post 'From Back in the Day'

The hidden power within children: "an intense motivation to perceive reality"

Children working with Montessori's binomial cube (left) and trinomial cube

"The powers working within children—this was Maria Montessori’s discovery. She discovered a hidden power in children of an intense motivation to perceive reality. 

    "This power begins in infancy with basic sense perception; an infant exerting effort to see things clearly. Then it becomes a toddler’s extraordinary effort to coordinate his movements to perform basic tasks. . . . Later, this power becomes a three-year old revisiting the trinomial cube over and over again across a span of many weeks to achieve mastery. . . . 

    "Throughout these examples we see a strong motivation to perceive, which is a power residing in the soul of every child. And the Montessori materials are inventions which tap into this motivation and unleash this power.“

~ Mike Gustafson from his post 'The Rocket Ship of the Human Spirit.' Hat tip Carrie-Ann Biondi who notes Gustafson’s emboldened point "reminds me of the beautiful opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Joe Sachs’s trans.): “All humans by nature stretch themselves out toward understanding."

"You can't address a fundamental problem by making marginal changes."

Here's the basic problem with David Seymour's Regulatory Standards Bill:

"You can't address a fundamental problem by making marginal changes."

Its remarkable timidity is its underlying flaw. It either makes fundamental change, so is worth passing, or it doesn't — which is now how Seymour is left to defend it. If it doesn't, then one is left to wonder: what's the point?

The defence, however noble, is not helped by the apparent illiteracy of attackers who impute everything into the bland legalese every imaginary vice they can dream up. 

The simple yet tragic fact is this:

"Absent a fundamental shift in which our politicians are guided by restoring government to its proper purpose, i.e., the protection of individual rights, there will only be this nibbling at the margins. Meanwhile the leviathan will grow out of control until the unsustainable mess mercilessly self-corrects."

"This is also the reason why the olive branch became a symbol for peace"

 

"Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, was the guardian of the city [of Athens], and she had offered it the gift of the olive tree. Since it takes many years for olive trees to bear plenty of fruit, the planting of so many olive trees in Athens indicates that people had hope for the future and they had found ways to feed themselves until then.
    "This is also the reason why the olive branch became a symbol for peace. If it takes two decades for your trees to bear a substantial harvest, you are extra vulnerable to warfare that might wipe out all your investments in one moment. Therefore olive growers usually insisted on negotiations and reconciliation when city-states were at each other's throats, and the olive came to symbolise both commerce and peace."

~ Johan Norberg on free trade as a powerful palliative for conflict and war. From his book Peak Human: What We Can Learn From the Rise dnd Fall of Golden Ages [hat tip Tony Morley]

"Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits."

"Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.
    "Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat."

~ James Clear. It brings to mind the quote with which Will Durant summarised Aristotle's similar point: "[W]e are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

"Immigrants justifiably celebrate when they obtain citizenship in their new country ..."

"Immigrants justifiably celebrate when they obtain citizenship in their new country ...

"Aside from patriotism, however, the sense of jubilation they feel is significantly due to having secured at last the freedom to live and work without impediment by government.

"They should never have required citizenship in order to exercise these rights.

"Dispense with the fallacious zero-sum thinking that every migrant is a burden (as if we all partake from an imaginary finite pie of opportunity).

"Let anyone arrive and work, so long as they are law-abiding and willing to stake no claim on the welfare state, insofar that it exists.

"On this basis, there ought to be no compelling impetus for migrants to seek or obtain citizenship.

"Let them apply after 20 years of continuous and law-abiding residence."

~ David P.

"'Boomers' have encouraged a legacy of violent protest. That gets the ’60s all wrong."

"'Boomers' have encouraged a legacy of violent protest. That gets the ’60s all wrong. ... I blame the 'Boomer' generation that sold a deeply misleading history of civil rights in a case of generational stolen valour. ...

"Civil rights didn’t happen because of rowdy and violent protests—nor did Social Security, the expansion of free speech, or even the Great Society. That’s a myth told by a Boomer generation that employed such tactics to steal the achievements of a prior generation that didn’t. Until we dispel this widely believed untruth among younger generations raised on the falsehood, we’ll continually botch any potential at making [things] better.

"America’s Civil Rights Movement is usually lumped into the cultural turmoil [that popular histories simply] call 'the ’60s.' In reality, what we remember as the ’60s was two entirely different periods of history. Most of [the turmoil] we remember as the 1960s in reality happened in the 1970s. A lot of the Civil Rights Movement that we also remember as the 1960s in reality happened in the 1950s. The dividing line between these eras is 1964. On one side is the Civil Rights Act and Great Society of 1964, which we can think of as the culmination of reform efforts of the ’50s. On the other side are the explosive protests and public upheaval of 1968, which ushered in a new era of radicalism that American society is still, in many ways, attempting to recover from.

"What began America’s Civil Rights Era was [not the 'protest era' of the '60s, but] the Second World War, a war waged in the name of democracy in which over a million black Americans bravely fought for freedom. Then they came home to a country that treated them like dirt. ... After the war, America started moving slowly to finally do something about racism and segregation. ... Out of that sensibility emerged a Civil Rights Movement eager to end this hypocrisy and which was led by the World War II generation of the 'Greatest Generation' and 'Silents.' The 'Boomers,' the children born after the war’s end, were just kids during this era. ...

"This movement was built around an ethic of non-violence. ... Civil Rights Era protests were ones in which well-dressed people arrived to respectfully make their presence known. They wouldn’t comply with unjust laws or systems, but behaved with dignity and restraint.

"Dignity in resistance wasn’t meant to scare America into doing the right thing. It wasn’t about making unreasonable demands to spark a political revolution. It was meant to shame America into doing what it already knew was right. It worked because Americans deeply understood their hypocrisy was a national embarrassment. ...

"The protesters who brought about this achievement hadn’t shouted, waved their fists, or cursed—much less burned things, threatened people, or rioted. Why then do so many young protesters think otherwise? Why do they think Civil Rights was the result of wild and violent protesting? Because of the myths of the [later] Baby Boomers who wrote the story, stealing the valour of the previous generation to cover their own failure.

"The Spirit of 1968 [however—the spirit of 'Boomer' protest—] was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in which protesters fought a street battle with police on national television. ... [T]he Spirit of 1968 ... was the epitome of the Baby Boomer protest movement. ... New Left activists ... maintained the same militant tone claiming the impossibility of reform and the need for revolution against the system. Their protests were rowdy, with stunts and shouting and theatrics. New Left activists rejected the nonviolent principles of their predecessors. ...

"What exactly did the New Left movement achieve? It failed to nominate its anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in Chicago. ...

"What policies can the New Left claim? It didn’t even manage to stop the Vietnam War or end the draft. ...

"Politically, the New Left so discredited itself with America that, on a national level, it destroyed the Democratic Party for a generation. ...

" Tackling [change takes] hard work. In place of serious reform, we get threats and histrionics. We get more Che Guevara, and less Edmund Burke. The young people who should become the ground troops for serious reform have sidelined themselves as irrelevant.

"I don’t entirely blame them. They’ve been lied to. In a bid to steal valour they didn’t earn, their teachers and leaders told them this is how change happens. It’s long past time for this dangerous myth to die."

~ Frank DiStefano from his post 'The Left Is Misremembering Civil Rights'

A tragic Trump tariff tale tweeted

"After failing to make trade deals, Trump is now just posting letters to world leaders announcing new tariff rates."

~ Meidas Touch

"Every one of the tariff letters ends by noting 'These Tariffs may be modified, upward or downward, depending on our relationship with your Country.' No American company is going to open a new factory based on the protection offered by a tariff [that] could disappear before the concrete sets."

~ Justin Wolfers

"They're not even letters. They're posts on the President's social media platform. .... So far: Japan 25% South Korea: 25% Malaysia: 25% Kazakhstan: 25% (very niiice) South Africa: 30% Laos: 40% Myanmar: 40% ... PLUS the sectoral tariffs"

~ Justin Wolfers

"Reminder: the US has a FREE TRADE AGREEMENT with South Korea, signed by the President (GWB) & implemented into LAW by Congress, and TRUMP HIMSELF signed a mini-deal w/ SK in 2018. Now ALL South Korean imports get a 25% tariff — for now. NO incentive for South Korea (or anyone else) to negotiate with him."

~ Scott Lincicome

"Unlike most of the countries Trump is shaking down with tariffs, South Korea has a free trade agreement with the U.S. (KORUS) that was ratified by Congress. The Constitution gives control of trade policy entirely to Congress, the president has no legal authority to do this."

~ Aaron Fritschner

"Trump punishes nice allies while he has not imposed any tariff on Russia or Belarus & no new sanctions either. Trump is transparently for our enemies & against our friends."

~ Anders Aslund

"[T]he logic is not just wrong - it’s economically backwards. Here's why:  

    "First, tariffs are not paid by foreign countries. A 40% tariff as an example goods means U.S. importers pay 40% more. Those importers pass the cost to consumers. Tariffs are taxes — and they hurt Americans, not the governments being 'punished.

    "Second, the letter treats the trade deficit as a threat. But a trade deficit isn’t inherently bad — it’s a reflection of dollar dominance. The U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Foreign nations want to hold dollars and invest in American assets — like U.S. Treasury bonds, real estate, and equities. This demand for dollars keeps the currency strong and allows Americans to buy more goods from abroad. That’s what creates a trade deficit — not weakness, but strength and global trust. So while countries exports goods to the U.S., the U.S. exports financial assets to the world. That’s not losing - that’s global balance.  

    "Third, the idea of retaliatory tariffs — 'if you raise yours, we’ll raise ours higher' — is not a strategy. It’s a threat that damages diplomacy, disrupts supply chains, and raises costs for American companies and consumers alike. Trade is not a zero-sum game. This kind of mercantilist thinking — where every deficit is seen as a loss and every surplus as a win — belongs in the 1700s. In a modern, interconnected global economy, it’s outdated and harmful. Bottom line:  

• Tariffs are taxes on Americans 
• Trade deficits reflect dollar strength, not weakness 
•  Retaliatory trade policy only hurts U.S. businesses 

"Economic nationalism may sound tough, but it’s American wallets that take the hit."

~ Jon Wiltshire

"Trump: What people don’t understand is... the country eats the tariff, the company eats the tariff and it’s not passed along at all… China is eating the tariffs. 

"Fact-check: False. Costs associated with tariffs are almost universally passed to consumers."

~ The Intellectualist

"Most people won’t pay for AI voluntarily"

"Most people won’t pay for AI voluntarily—just 8% according to a recent survey. ...

"Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?

"That’s never happened before in human history. Everybody wanted electricity in their homes. Everybody wanted a radio. Everybody wanted a phone. Everybody wanted a refrigerator. Everybody wanted a TV set. Everybody wanted the Internet.

"They wanted it. They paid for it. They enjoyed it.

"AI isn’t like that. People distrust it or even hate it—and more so with each passing month. ...

"When AI is added to a product, people want it LESS. Survey of 4,000 consumers show that only 18% prefer AI. Everyone else opposes it, or is indifferent.

"Experts are now warning companies that their mad rush to adopt AI may erode customer trust and hurt sales. ...

"The 'Wall Street Journal' concludes that companies should “beware of promoting AI in products.”

"And it’s more than just products and services. People don’t even want AI in texts or documents of any sort. ...

"Judging by the current situation, tech companies will move quickly. They don’t ask for permission. It just happens.

"What’s most shocking is that they have done all this before making AI reliable. Every day I hear accounts of stupid and ridiculous things coming from bots. You would think they would fix this mess before forcing AI on us.

"But here’s the harsh reality. They won’t fix it, because they don’t know how."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public'

"New Zealand has become trapped in a malaise of wanting to be seen to do good at the expense of achieving anything."

"[T]he Environmental, Societal and Governance mantra ... has proven to be a drag on commerce since it emerged two decades ago. ...

"Social responsibility, the forerunner of ESG, was a popular way for executives to appear virtuous while spending their shareholder’s money ... [Milton] Friedman ... claim[ed] that there is only one social responsibility of business: 'to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.'

"The Chicago University economist was campaigning against business leaders voluntarily engaging in acts of moral worthiness with other people’s resources, but today we face a more pernicious evil; state-mandated virtue. ...

"Section 7A of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013 ... obligates certain large firms, from AA Insurance to Z Energy to prepare climate statements and report on their greenhouse gas emissions.

"It is an absurdly onerous regime that achieves nothing. ...'[C]limate change reporting,' harrumphed [Warehouse chair Joan Withers] to the NBR, 'is taking up more director’s time than financial statements' ... [with] not one carbon molecule less ... emitted as a result of the thousands of pages these reports produce. ... a symptom of a wider malaise. ...

"New Zealand has become trapped in a malaise of wanting to be seen to do good at the expense of achieving anything."

~ Damien grant from his column 'Why climate change reporting is achieving nothing'

The models were wrong — "they might as well be tea leaf readers when it comes to predicting the climate"

"Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctic sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice 'as big as Switzerland' have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.

"To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50°. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an 'expected response to a warming climate' they said that started in about 1980, 'however, this trend reversed abruptly after 2015.'

"So as news seeps out this week that there is a 'dangerous feedback loop' where shrinking ice is warming the ocean, bear in mind that the experts also admit this is 'completely unexpected' which is their way of saying 'the models were wrong.' Carbon dioxide was not supposed to do this.

"Most likely some large natural cycle has shifted gears. Steadily rising CO2 didn’t cause the rise in sea level before 2015, and didn’t cause the decline after that either. There are bigger forces at work, and we don’t know what they are…

Graph adapted from Climate4You 

"When the die-hard believers point out that Antarctica is 'just catching up' and that they always said Antarctic sea ice would shrink, remind them that Turner et al said in 2013: 'The increase in Antarctic sea ice remains one of the great unsolved puzzles of climate science.' Now they have a new theory, 'the salinity changed' — but what caused that? They don’t know. They might as well be tea leaf readers when it comes to predicting the climate."

~ Jo Nova from her post 'Suddenly 1.5 million square km of sea ice is missing near Antarctica and all the climate models were wrong'

"The American Revolution brought about enormous net benefits not just for citizens of the newly independent United States but also, over the long run, for people across the globe."

"[T]he American Revolution ... brought about enormous net benefits not just for citizens of the newly independent United States but also, over the long run, for people across the globe. ...

"[W]hat specific benefits came about because of the American Revolution. There are at least four momentous ones. They are all libertarian alterations in the internal status quo that prevailed, although they were sometimes deplored or resisted by American nationalists.

"1. The First Abolition: Prior to the American Revolution, every New World colony, British or otherwise, legally sanctioned slavery, and nearly every colony counted enslaved people among its population. ... [T]he Revolution’s liberating spirit brought about outright abolition or gradual emancipation in all northern states by 1804. ...

"[E]mancipation had to start somewhere. The fact that it did so where opposition was weakest in no way diminishes the radical nature of this assault upon a labour system that had remained virtually unchallenged since the dawn of civilisation. Of course, slavery had largely died out within Britain. But ... Parliament did not formally and entirely abolish the institution in the mother country until 1833.

"Even in southern colonies, the Revolution’s assault on human bondage made some inroads. Several southern states banned the importation of slaves and relaxed their nearly universal restrictions on masters voluntarily freeing their own slaves. Through resulting manumissions, 10,000 Virginia slaves were freed, more than were freed in Massachusetts by judicial decree. This spawned the first substantial communities of free blacks, which in the upper South helped induce a slow, partial decline of slavery....

"2. Separation of Church and State: ... With the adoption of the Constitution and then the First Amendment, the United States become the first country to separate church and state at the national level. ...

"3. Republican Governments: As a result of the Revolution, nearly all of the former colonies adopted written state constitutions setting up republican governments with limitations on state power embodied in bills of rights. ...

"4. Extinguishing the Remnants of Feudalism and Aristocracy: ... The U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility may seem trivial and quaint to modern eyes. But such titles, still prevalent throughout the Old World, always involved enormous legal privileges. This provision is, therefore, a manifestation of the extent to which the Revolution witnessed a decline in deference throughout society. No one has captured this impact better than the dean of revolutionary historians, Gordon Wood, in his Pulitzer Prize winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution. He points out that in 1760 the “two million monarchical subjects” living in the British colonies “still took it for granted that society was and ought to be a hierarchy of ranks and degrees of dependency.” But “by the early years of the nineteenth century the Revolution had created a society fundamentally different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century.”

"One can view this transition even through subtle changes in language. White employees no longer referred to their employers as “master” or “mistress” but adopted the less servile Dutch word “boss.” Men generally began using the designation of “Mr.,” traditionally confined to the gentry. Although these are mere cultural transformations, they both reflected and reinforced the erosion of coercive supports for hierarchy, in a reinforcing cycle. ...

"Global Repercussions ...

"The impact of the American Revolution on the international spread of liberal and revolutionary ideals is well known. Its success immediately inspired anti-monarchical, democratic, or independence movements not only in France, but also in the Netherlands, Belgium, Geneva, Ireland, and the French sugar island of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti). What is less well understood is how the Revolution altered the trajectory of British policy with respect to its settler colonies. Imperial authorities became more cautious about imposing the rigid authoritarian control they had attempted prior to the Revolution. Over time they increasingly accommodated settler demands for autonomy and self-government. In short, the Revolution generated two distinct forms of British imperialism: one for native peoples and the other for European settlers.

"This was immediately apparent in Canada. ... [with] Parliament’s Constitutional Act of 1791 divid[ing] Quebec into two colonies, Upper and Lower Canada, each with its own elected assembly. ... Although Australia upon initial British settlement in 1788 began as a penal colony with autocratic rule, agitation for representative government emerged early and was consummated with the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850.

"British New Zealand was originally part of the colony of New South Wales in Australia, but it was separated in 1849 and got a representative government three years later. South Africa fell under sustained British rule in 1806. By 1854, the Cape Colony had its own parliament. ...

"Conclusion ...

"[R]evolutions are always ... messy and produce mixed results. It also explains why so few revolutions actually bestow genuine benefits. ... The anti-slavery movement, first sparked by the Revolution, is one clear case.

The American Revolution is another such case. The embattled farmers who stood at Lexington green and Concord bridge in April 1775 were only part-time soldiers, with daily cares and families to support. Their lives were hard. The British redcoats they faced were highly trained and disciplined professionals serving the world’s mightiest military power. Yet when they fired the “shot heard ’round the world” that touched off the American Revolution, they initiated a cascade of positive externalities that not only U.S. citizens but also people throughout the world continue to benefit from today, more than two centuries later. They had no hope—indeed no thought—of charging for these non-excludable benefits. Nonetheless, they took the risk. What better reason to celebrate the 4th of July?

~ Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (Professor of economics at San Jose State University and the author of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War), from his article 'Benefits of the American Revolution: An Exploration of Positive Externalities'