Talk-Polywell.org

Dissolution of the Long Parliament by Oliver Cromwell given to the House of Commons, 20 April 1653

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!




http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-t ... iament.htm

Um, didn't that end up about like what you would expect if, for example, Jerry Falwell siezed control of the government?

Better a bunch of scalliwags at each other's throats and with some hope of a balance of power than a single religious zealot running all.

I believe the Brits concluded, in a few years, they would rather scour the continent for a replacement King than put up with Cromwell.

The most notable thing about King Charles I was that he was 5 foot 7 inches tall at the beginning of his reign and only 4 foot 9 inches tall at the end of it

...and all because taxation that was raised to a rate of a shilling in the pound (5%) to fund a war was considered a "contempt of all virtue"....

Did we ever find out the vexatious taxation rate that the Boston Tea Party was all about? I can't help but think we'll end up finding they were arguing over tax going from 2% to 4% or something like that....

I just found out that 22.5% of my tax money is just administrative waste.
Pretty sad. The thing is, I could do with much less government and I would do away with all those things where the government really has shown to not do a good job (my government):
Funding for arts, cultural events and organisations, religious events and organisations, much of the foreign relations crap. Funding for other countries, pay back for whatever some German did in WW2 (still paying after 65 years), Eu crap, more EU crap, road maintenace, banking, railroad, unions, pension/retirement, employment, city maintenance, parking...

Chris,

It was more like the tax going from 0% to 1%. The bitch was not the amount, but the fact the tax was being imposed without any opportunity for us to vote on it. Colonists believed if they were to be taxed, they should have full rights as British citizens, with seats in the above-mentioned house of scoundrels.

The King disagreed, so we spent a few years convincing them to let us alone, set up our own government, proceeded to tax whiskey (resulting in the Whiskey Rebellion), and have since refined the art of voting scalliwags into office to tax us worse than any King ever did.

Um, didn't that end up about like what you would expect if, for example, Jerry Falwell siezed control of the government?

Lol, that's about the best response I think anyone could have come up with.

IIRC the majority party in Parliament was itself not interested in having reps from the 13 colonies, or any other colonies. I believe that the minority was more pro-American.

There was also the problem, aspects of which were discussed in pamphlets in the 1760s and 1770s, that with the technology of the time it took weeks for travel across the Atlantic, and ships were lost in storms more frequently than today (of course, the contemporary pamphlets didn't provide the historical analysis of the technology I just did). This would have made it difficult for Members of Parliament from N. America to represent their jurisdictions effectively. Really, the most effective approach would have been to set up a North American parliament that would raise taxes and a Continental Army itself (rather than pay taxes to Parliament in Britain, which argued that it needed that money, at least in part, to pay to maintain the military in N. America for the defense of the Colonies.)

This was actually the approach that was taken with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the late 19th century - Parliament probably learned its lesson from 1776, although it never really admitted it.

The counterfactual of if this approach had been taken is interesting. Likely changes:

1. Would a capital like Washington exist, or would NYC have ended up the capital?
2. Most likely there would be no Canada, it would all be "America." Maybe officially something like United Provinces of America.
3. Would there have been another war anyway? For instance, Parliament in Britain might still have tried to force America to not expand beyond the Appalachians, and to retain direct control of the Mississippi/Ohio forts. Would the War of 1812 have become the war of independence?
4. Would slavery have been banned in America at the same time as the rest of the British Empire, or would an exception have been made? Would that have led to the civil war happening earlier?
5. Would there have been a split over America getting into a war with Mexico around 1850 and Britain not agreeing to it?

And so on...

Hmmm, but by the late 19th century, the technology did exist for nearly instantaneous communications across the Atlantic. Submarine cables, telegraphy, and all that. American invention. It all started with this guy named Franklin. Who inspired the French. Ah, some guy named Faraday helped some I guess.

The Emperor of China had Zheng He's fleet (which should have been capable of reaching the Pacific coast of the Americas, and may have done so) burned. One imagines he understood how hard it would be to rule a land at such a distance by imperial decree. But consider the problem of allowing self rule to a people decended from those capable of the voyage!

One of the great draws of the American colonies was an opportunity to escape the turmoil of English politics of the 17th century. The children of those colonists watched the goings on in the Mother Country with great interest, and devised a way to do better.

Just a thought about our origins as a nation. We raised a ragtag army to fight the Redcoats, based on a promise to pay later. The Continental Congress lacked any source of revenue, so the troops were frequently unpaid. So we set the precedent of making fiscal promises we could not keep even before winning our independence.

There is a difficulty in establishing a goverment from a revolution inspired by tiny taxes, when that revolution costs money. Soldiers have this annoying whiny insistence on being paid.

We finally paid at least in part by seizing the property of Torys, and selling it or turning it over to vets. Later we seized Indian lands in new territories the British had prohibited us from using, paying soldiers with land either directly or indirectly.

We continued this in the Louisiana Purchase, bought with money we did not have. The French worked out the financing using ... wait for it ... a British bank! Thus funding more trouble against the Brits by Napoleon, plus more ability for us to expand across the continent, to the dismay of the previous inhabitants. So this business of spending money we did not have is a long tradition, frequently profitable, entrenching the practice.

This only goes to show we did learn politics from the British.

Another observation regarding funding war: many ships in The Royal Navy were French. The French did not sell them, they were war prizes. Captains and crews got bonuses for capturing ships rather than sinking them. Alas, land battles offer less potential to recoup costs. Plus, the French got a chance to express their discontent at Yorktown.

Looking up Cromwell, I see that his salary as Lord Protector was 100,000 pounds annually!!! I don't know the exchange rate back then (the dollar did not exist yet), but it used to be more like $10 for a pound sterling. The US goverment budget for the first year of Washington's presidency was supposed to be something like $7 million. But let's call Cromwell's salary a million bucks ... ish. That would be 14% of the US goverment budget over a century later. Or it would fund current spending for a few seconds.

So the Lord protector also introduced the idea of overpaying a non-regal chief executive!

Actually, your discussion of early American and 18th century British history reminds me how I find some of the policies strikingly reminiscent to those of the Romans. Need to pay soldiers? Treasury low? Give them land. If you don't have extra good land, take it from people who are out of favor politically. Can't do that? Seize it from neighboring peoples.

I often find myself citing the massively more complex transportation infrastructure, education, and health care systems that modern western societies seem to require as amongst the reasons for much higher taxes (and the related bloating of bureaucracies to manage them). But the whole idea of seizing property and using it to pay for the costs of war was a key component of those earlier societies as well.

Actually, with the massive movement of people to urban areas, there would probably be a fair bit of decent rural land left abandoned in the U.S. today. If only many of those retiring soldiers could be convinced that they should become farmers and take their pay in land, you could fix rural decay and reduce the military budget (assumption being that people's salaries are the biggest expense)...

When I mention rural decay I'm thinking of areas that are used to be productive but are falling apart, like in Victor Davis Hanson's article I posted a link to somewhere here last week.

To fix some places, you'd also need your retired soldiers to rebuild more efficient irrigation systems and make jurisdictions such as California let them have water again...

One of the great draws of the American colonies was an opportunity to escape the turmoil of English politics of the 17th century. The children of those colonists watched the goings on in the Mother Country with great interest, and devised a way to do better.

I wonder if America would have attracted significantly fewer immigrants had it not been seen as a completely separate and new nation, apart from the old rivalries and politics of Europe.

As some sort of proto-Dominion still linked to Britain, America may have expanded westward much more slowly and would perhaps not have created new technology as quickly either. Europe might also have gotten more overpopulated. You end up with a butterfly effect where you can't even really estimate what the world would have looked like by 1914.

However, if you do get a WW I analog, possibly the Germans and Austrians have a significantly larger population and win. On the other hand, America gets automatically pulled into the war in 1914 as part of the British Empire, but maybe it only has 60-70 million people.

It's quite possible that the American revolution produced an America that after 1914 was more useful to Britain, even fundamental to its survival, than a constitutionally bound American dominion would have been. Possible irony of history?

In accordance with parliamentry tradition, the government party benches are kept two and one half sword lengths apart from the benches of 'Her Majesties Loyal Opposition'.
If the American revolution hadn't happened in 1776 over tea, might it have happened when slavery was banned throughout the British empire. Then Robert E. Lee would have been fighting the Red coats with Grant on the British side.

I notice that members of the House of Commons are far more likely to get into fisticuffs than Congressmen. Have we had any decent duels in Washington since Burr capped Hamilton?

On this matter of tea, the Tea Tax had a profound cultural impact on the US: it marked our switch to other beverages, notably coffee. We haven't been able to relax since. We still don't drink tea properly. I do have a cup or two of green tea daily, due to the supposed health benefits. I dash into the break area, tear open a pack and drop a bag in hot water from a dispenser, dunk the bag a few times, and rush back to my desk to gulp it down while working. Somehow I suspect a tea ceremony, complete with a delightful young Japanese maiden serving it, would prove more beneficial.

One might argue this factor alone set the US on a different arc thru history. Would telegraphy have really caught on were our hands not already twitchy? Would Edison have invented the light bulb, and would it have been such a market success, if we could get to sleep at night? How much coffee were they drinking in South Carolina when they decided war with the North was a good idea?

Members of parliament are exempt from libel law for anything they say about each other in the chamber, so long as they don't repeat it on the outside. Hence the requirement for the speaker to be armed with a mace.

Perhaps tea is the original insidious mind control drug, and the British were using it to control the American population. That would mean it wasn't just a tax protest in Boston.