Overemphasizing the Iroquois influence on American political thought might be forgivable if Burns were offering his audience a menu of those influences for context and just got excessively enthusiastic in boosting one of them. But he does nothing of the sort. Instead, his presentation strips the revolutionary generation of nearly all of their other influences, aiming instead to shear them from their cultural and intellectual heritage. He brings out a historian to argue specifically that the universalist language of the revolution about the rights of man severed its connection to their English roots — roots that Burns seems very eager to downplay. That gives the audience no context in which to evaluate his ode to the Iroquois example.
While there is time to discuss the Haudenosaunee, there’s no mention of Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution. No time is given to Locke or Montesquieu, or to the ancient Greek democracies or the Roman Republic, the birth and death of which fixated the Founders (hence, the popularity of Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato. There’s nothing on the Mayflower Compact or the 1619 founding of the Virginia House of Burgesses, both made by men who had doubtless not yet heard much if anything about Native Americans in upstate New York. The Founding Fathers are extracted entirely from the context of the English political culture, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the classics.
You can’t make this mistake by accident. Few people in history have left behind a richer record of what they were thinking than the American Founders. They debated, in closed sessions and open newspapers and pamphlets, the drafting and ratification of 13 new state constitutions (14, counting Vermont’s 1777 constitution as an independent republic), the Articles of Confederation, and the ultimate federal Constitution. James Madison took copious notes at Philadelphia in 1787, which were published after the death of everyone involved.
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Why does Ken Burns wish his audience to believe untruths about the American Founding? To be fair, there is plenty to like in the first episode. It’s hard not to tell an inspiring story in covering this material. Burns is a skillful storyteller backed by a star-studded voiceover cast, including Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney reprising the voices of John and Abigail Adams. Onscreen, we hear from many distinguished historians. But he just can’t seem to resist the temptation to tell a story that is fashionable with the enemies of the American Founding rather than one that is true.
Brian Albrecht reveals the efficiency of inefficient taxes. A slice:
I want to go through two economic models that explain why voters prefer “inefficient” taxes. The first, from Gary Becker and Casey Mulligan, argues that inefficient taxes create political resistance that keeps rates low. The second, my own take on a model from David Friedman’s work on punishment, argues that inefficient taxes prevent the state from becoming too aggressive in extraction.
Think of taxation as a conflict between the state trying to extract and taxpayers trying to resist. The Becker-Mulligan model focuses on the defender: inefficient taxes hurt enough to keep taxpayers vigilant and politically mobilized. That’s the demand side of policy. The Friedman model focuses on the attacker: inefficient taxes make enforcement unprofitable, so the state backs off. That’s the supply side of policy. Both models give political economy reasons for why we see so little “efficient” taxation.
Trump’s redistribution venture arrives at a moment when the UBI plot has been embraced by the UN and the World Economic Forum. Numerous US states have engaged in pilot projects, generally deemed “successful” from the progressive nanny-state perspective. The rise of AI is now the dominant excuse for implementing UBI.
A tariff-based dividend accelerates this trend, but is even worse in the novel way it weaponizes regulation itself. Instead of responding to an external shock like COVID or the 2008 financial crisis, Trump’s tariff dividend “responds” to a purely self-inflicted wound—disruptions and higher prices caused by trade barriers.
The lesson progressives are learning is not merely to “never let a crisis go to waste.” It now extends to engineering their own crisis levers: using general tax receipts to justify stipend checks, as in the past, while also “entrepreneurially” tweaking trade barriers to generate “revenue” and distribute checks.
Trump has just delivered to progressives a turnkey mechanism for a future “American People’s Dividend” indexed to whatever priority Washington wants to manipulate—climate, equity, public health, or industrial policy. Does anyone think they’ll refuse this gift?
DeWine does not speak ill of today’s president. Some unspoken inferences are, however, unavoidable. Nationally, there are more than 400,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs, while ICE warriors, dressed for combat on Iwo Jima, swarm U.S. communities, deporting workers.
Jess Coleman tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
It still blows my mind that Jim Crow-era zoning laws—even literal bans on multi-family housing in wealthy neighborhoods—somehow got rebranded as progressive regulation.
