ללא מחבר No Author

Trigger-Warning Warning Instituted For Those Triggered By Trigger Warnings

The American Revolution Was a Mistake

I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.

In 2008, Alvin Rabushka’s book of almost 1,000 pages appeared: Taxation in Colonial America (Princeton University Press). In a review published in the Business History Review, the reviewer summarizes the book’s findings.

Rabushka’s most original and impressive contribution is his measurement of tax rates and tax burdens. However, his estimate of comparative trans-Atlantic tax burdens may be a bit of moving target. At one point, he concludes that, in the period from 1764 to 1775, “the nearly two million white colonists in America paid on the order of about 1 percent of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or one twenty-fifth, in per capita terms, not taking into account the higher average income and consumption in the colonies” (p. 729). Later, he writes that, on the eve of the Revolution, “British tax burdens were ten or more times heavier than those in the colonies” (p. 867). Other scholars may want to refine his estimates, based on other archival sources, different treatment of technical issues such as the adjustment of intercolonial and trans-Atlantic comparisons for exchange rates, or new estimates of comparative income and wealth. Nonetheless, no one is likely to challenge his most important finding: the huge tax gap between the American periphery and the core of the British Empire.

The colonists had a sweet deal in 1775. Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth. Switzerland was probably the most free nation, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any other nation in 1775 that was ahead of Great Britain. And in Great Britain’s Empire, the colonists were by far the freest.

I will say it, loud and clear: the freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, with the exception of the slave system. Anyone who was not a slave had incomparable freedom.

Jefferson wrote these words in the Declaration of Independence:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

I can think of no more misleading political assessment uttered by any leader in the history of the United States. No words having such great impact historically in this nation were less true. No political bogeymen invoked by any political sect as “the liar of the century” ever said anything as verifiably false as these words.

The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Some members signed the Declaration on July 4. The public in general believed the leaders at the Continental Congress. They did not understand what they were about to give up. They could not see what price in blood and treasure and debt they would soon pay. And they did not foresee the tax burden in the new nation after 1783.

In an article on taxation in that era, Rabushka gets to the point.

Historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times higher, than they were under British rule. More money was required for national defense than previously needed to defend the frontier from Indians and the French, and the new nation faced other expenses.

So, as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.

The debt burden soared as soon as the Revolution began. Monetary inflation wiped out the currency system. Price controls in 1777 produced the debacle of Valley Forge. Percy Greaves, a disciple of Ludwig von Mises and for 17 years an attendee at his seminar, wrote this in 1972.

Our Continental Congress first authorized the printing of Continental notes in 1775. The Congress was warned against printing more and more of them. In a 1776 pamphlet, Pelatiah Webster, America’s first economist, told his fellow men that Continental currency might soon become worthless unless something was done to curb the further printing and issuance of this paper money.

The people and the Congress refused to listen to his wise advice. With more and more paper money in circulation, consumers kept bidding up prices. Pork rose from 4¢ to 8¢ a pound. Beef soared from about 4¢ to 100 a pound. As one historian tells us, “By November, 1777, commodity prices were 480% above the prewar average.”

The situation became so bad in Pennsylvania that the people and legislature of this state decided to try “a period of price control, limited to domestic commodities essential for the use of the army.” It was thought that this would reduce the cost of feeding and supplying our Continental Army. It was expected to reduce the burden of war.

The prices of uncontrolled, imported goods then went sky high, and it was almost impossible to buy any of the domestic commodities needed for the Army. The controls were quite arbitrary. Many farmers refused to sell their goods at the prescribed prices. Few would take the paper Continentals. Some, with large families to feed and clothe, sold their farm products stealthily to the British in return for gold. For it was only with gold that they could buy the necessities of life which they could not produce for themselves.

On December 5, 1777, the Army’s Quartermaster-General, refusing to pay more than the government-set prices, issued a statement from his Reading, Pennsylvania headquarters saying, “If the farmers do not like the prices allowed them for this produce let them choose men of more learning and understanding the next election.”

This was the winter of Valley Forge, the very nadir of American history. On December 23, 1777, George Washington wrote to the President of the Congress, “that, notwithstanding it is a standing order, and often repeated, that the troops shall always have two days’ provisions by them, that they might be ready at any sudden call; yet an opportunity has scarcely ever offered, of taking an advantage of the enemy, that has not been either totally obstructed, or greatly impeded, on this account…. we have no less than two thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight men now in camp unfit for duty, because they are barefoot and otherwise naked…. I am now convinced beyond a doubt, that, unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place, this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things: starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.”

Only after the price control law was repealed in 1778 could the army buy goods again. But the hyperinflation of the continentals and state-issued currencies replaced the pre-Revolution system of silver currency: Spanish pieces of eight.

The proponents of independence invoked British tyranny in North America. There was no British tyranny, and surely not in North America.

In 1872, Frederick Engels wrote an article, “On Authority.” He criticized anarchists, whom he called anti-authoritarians. His description of the authoritarian character of all armed revolutions should remind us of the costs of revolution.

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.

After the American Revolution, 46,000 American loyalists fled to Canada. They were not willing to swear allegiance to the new colonial governments. The retained their loyalty to the nation that had delivered to them the greatest liberty on earth. They had not committed treason.

The revolutionaries are not remembered as treasonous. John Harrington told us why sometime around 1600. “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

The victors write the history books.

What would libertarians — even conservatives — give today in order to return to an era in which the central government extracted 1% of the nation’s wealth? Where there was no income tax?

Would they describe such a society as tyrannical?

That the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence was signed by the richest smuggler in North America was no coincidence. He was hopping mad. Parliament in 1773 had cut the tax on tea imported by the British East India Company, so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers’ cost on non-British tea. This had cost Hancock a pretty penny. The Tea Party had stopped the unloading of the tea by throwing privately owned tea off a privately owned ship — a ship in competition with Hancock’s ships. The Boston Tea Party was in fact a well-organized protest against lower prices stemming from lower taxes.

So, once again, I shall not celebrate the fourth of July.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

שישו את ירושלים

מאתר יוטיוב, כאן.

ואין אנחנו יכולים לעלות? – שקר! | אנחנו יכולים וחייבים לעלות בהמונינו להר הבית

Mar 14, 2021

ואין אנחנו יכולים לעלות? • השקר הגדול ביותר • כל אחד כאן יכול להעיד שאנחנו יכולים לעלות להר הבית • למה אחנו מחכים? • האור החיים הקדוש אומר שעני לא צריך להמתין שיעשיר ויביא קרבן מכובד • עדיף שיביא עכשיו קרבן עני • הקב”ה נתן את המצוות לנו • אסור לנו להמתין אפילו רגע • התפקיד שלנו הוא לעלות להר הבית ולשכנע עוד יהודים לעלות להר • רק כך נוכל לבנות את בית המקדש • הרב יוסף אלבום • ראש חודש ניסן • בית המדרש בהר הבית

מאתר יוטיוב, כאן.

Vayakhel\Pekudei: Animal Sounds

by Rabbi Reven Chaim Klein

“Horses neigh and donkeys bray.” As every English-speaking child knows, roosters say “cock-a-doodle-do.” Yet, Israeli children will tell you that roosters crow, “koo-koo-ri-koo.” Similarly, while American children might imitate a dog by saying “bow-wow” or “ruff-ruff,” an Israeli child would instead say: “hav-hav.” All of these differences can be chalked up to onomatopoeia, which is the notion that some words are derived from the sounds associated with what those words denote. Because societies sometimes perceive sounds differently, they will sometimes refer to those sounds in different ways. What seems to be true across the board, though, is that in all languages the words for animal sounds seem to be derived from onomatopoeia. In this essay we will explore animal sounds in the Hebrew language and show how they are not synonyms in the same way that the English verbs meow and bark are not synonyms.

In English, we might say that a lion roars or growls, a cow moos, a hart coos, a bird chirps, a horse neighs, a bear snarls, etc… The notion that there are different verbs to denote each animal’s particular sounds is also found in Hebrew. In his epic response to Menachem Ibn Saruk (920-970), the early Hebrew grammarian Donash Ibn Labrat (920-990) was one of the first to notice that Biblical Hebrew uses different verbs to denote the sounds that different animals make. Menachem himself makes this point in Machberes Menachem when discussing the biliteral root GIMMEL-AYIN, but Donash elaborated on the idea further.

In lines 82–83 of his poem, Donash writes that a hart is oreg (Ps. 42:2), a lion is nohem (Prov. 19:12, 28:15), a cow/ox is goeh (I Shmuel 6:12, Iyov 6:5), a horse is tzohel (Jer. 5:8), and a bird is mitzaftzef (Isa. 10:14, 29:4, 38:14). In his more prosaic comments, Donash adds that a lion is shoeg (Amos 3:8, Yechezkel 22:25, Ps. 104:21), a bear is shokek (Prov. 28:15), a wild donkey is nohek (Iyov 6:5), and a dog is novayach (Isa. 56:10). Each of these different verbs applies to the sound-making of a specific creature. Donash additionally notes that the verb yehegeh applies both to the noise that a lion makes (Isa. 31:4) and to the noise that a dove makes (Isa. 59:11). (In the printed editions of Donash, the verb used for the wild donkey is nohem, not nohek. However, this is most likely a scribal error because the verb nohem never appears in the Bible concerning the wild donkey, while nohek does. By the way, the Talmud (Berachot 3a) also uses the verb nohem to denote the sound made by a dove.)

Interestingly, Donash also writes in that passage that a gever (“rooster”) is tzorayach. However, this understanding seems to be based on a mistaken reading of Tzephania 1:14 and Isa. 42:13, which use the verb tzorayach to denote the battle cry of a gibbor (“human warrior”), not gever.

In the Bible, the verb noer appears once — in reference to a lion cub’s roar (Jer. 51:38). Yet, in the Talmud (Berachot 3a), the verb noer refers to the sound that a donkey makes. Rabbi Nosson of Rome (1035-1106) in Sefer HaAruch explains away this discrepancy by noting that this verb primarily refers to the young lion’s roar, and it was used by the Talmud to refer to a donkey’s bray only in a borrowed sense.

In various places, Rashi also cites Donash’s list of different verbs that denote the sounds that animals make (or at least parts of that list). For example, see Rashi’s comments to Isa. 8:19, 29:4, Yoel 1:20, Ps. 42:2, Prov. 28:15, Iyov 6:5, and Chullin 53a. Rashi (to Chullin 53a) adds that another verb in Biblical Hebrew for a dog’s barking is charatz (see Ex. 11:7).

Rashi takes this idea a step further and offers various Aramaic equivalents to some of the Hebrew terms that we have encountered. For example, Rashi (to Chullin 53a) writes that the Aramaic meuh is equivalent to the Hebrew nohem (lions), and the Aramaic mikarkar is equivalent to the Hebrew goeh (cows/oxen). When talking about horses, Rashi (to Chullin 79a, Sotah 42a) writes that the Aramaic tznif is the equivalent to the Biblical tzohel. However, elsewhere the verb tznif is used to describe the noise made by a wild chicken (see Targum Sheini to Esther 1:2). Needless to say, none of these three Aramaic words ever appear in the Bible.

As an aside though, the word tzanif in Biblical Hebrew means “crown” (Isa. 62:3, Zech. 3:5, Iyov 29:14). Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (to Deut. 25:18) connects the word tzanif, which denotes something round whose ends are connected, to the word zanav (“tail”), which denotes the back-end appendage of an animal. His justification for drawing this comparison is the interchangeability of TZADI and ZAYIN, as well as PEH and BET.

An apocryphal Midrash describes the colorful sounds made by the enchanted animals etched into King Solomon’s throne. That Midrash associates a few more verbs with the sounds produced by various animals. Most of these words do not appear in the Bible: a hart is tzohel, a tiger is tzorayach, a sheep is chonev, a wolf is zorer/zored, a deer is mifaret, a bear is migamgem, a donkey/ibex is mavrim/mavris, an elephant is nohem/tofes, a Re’em is mitzaltzel, and a giraffe is milavlev. This Midrash is cited by the Kabbalistic work Sodi Razi (Hilchos Kisei) ascribed to Rabbi Elazar Rokeach of Worms (1176-1238), as well as by Rabbi Avraham ben Shlomo of Yemen’s commentary to I Kings 10:18. (See also Tosefta D’Targum to I Kings 10:20, and Targum Sheini to Esther 1:2.)

As is his way, Rabbi Shlomo Pappenehim of Breslau (1740-1814) offers etymological insights into some of these words for animal sounds by tracing them to their core biliteral roots. For example, he writes that the word goeh for a cow’s moo is derived from the root GIMMEL-AYIN (“exertion to the point of exhaustion”), which gives us such words as yagea (“tired”), yegiyah (“toiling”), and geviyah (“expiration/death”). This is because, as Rabbi Pappenheim explains, a cow exerts much effort in letting out those moos.

In discussing the verb mitzaftzef (“chirping“), Rabbi Pappenheim explains that the core root is TZADI-PEH, from which words like mitzapeh or zipui (“coating”), tzofeh (“gaze”), and tzipiyah (“anticipation”) are derived. The bird’s chirping expresses its anticipation and hope for the arrival of its mate and/or its food.

Concerning the word novayach (“barking”), Rabbi Pappenheim finds that its root is BET-CHET (“sound that travels through the air”), whose only other derivative is the first word in the term avchat cherev (Yechezkel 21:2), “the swooshing of a sword.”

When it comes to shokek to denote the bear’s roar, the Vilna Gaon (to Prov. 28:15) explains that this word is related to the word shokek in the sense of “desire,” because a bear is always hungry and desires food. Other commentators, like Ibn Janach and the Radak, explain that shokek does not refer to a bear’s roar, but to its sauntering gait as it walks. The way the Radak explains it, shokek is actually related to shok (commonly translated as “thigh,” but is more accurately the “calf”), which moves as one walks.

Rabbi Pappenheim argues that shokek is derived from the core meaning of the two-letter root SHIN-KUF, which means “making consecutive sounds.” He explains that when a lion is shokek, it produces consistent sounds one after the other. From this meaning, the word teshukah (“desire”) came about, because when one is in the throes of desire, one’s heartbeat becomes more noticeably consistent and consecutive. A tertiary meaning derived from this root is the word neshikah (“kiss”), which relates to SHIN-KUF either because it is the outward realization of one’s teshukah, or because kissing produces a distinct sound. Rabbi Pappenheim further explains that the word neshek as “weapon” relates to this root because the mechanics of the neshek create a certain type of noise, or because two opposing combatants approaching each other on the battlefield to fight resemble two lovers approaching each other for a kiss.

If you’ve been keeping track, there are four Biblical Hebrew words to denote the sound made by a lion: shoeg, nohem, yehegeh, and noer. Rabbi Yechiel Michel Stern (Rav of the Ezras Torah neighborhood of Jerusalem) suggests that these different words reflect the different reasons why a lion might make noise. For example, the Vilna Gaon (to Prov. 28:15) explains that a lion “roars” (shoeg) when it is hungry. By roaring, the lion tries to show its dominance in order to cause other animals to freeze up in fear and become its prey. Yet, Rashi (to Sanhedrin 102a, Berachot 32a) writes that a lion is nohem when it has a lot of food to eat, such that it becomes especially happy and goes berserk. Rabbi Stern does not explain what causes a lion to be yehegeh or noer.

Rabbi Pappenehim differentiates between these words for a lion’s roar by tracing them to their core roots. He explains that the word shoeg derives from the biliteral root SHIN-GIMMEL, which denotes “inadvertency” (like shogeg). He argues that shoeg specifically refers to the almost-involuntarily sound of letting out an emotional outburst in response to something painful or joyful.

Additionally, Rabbi Pappenheim traces the word yehgeh to the root HEY-GIMMEL, which primarily refers to “diligence” and “consistency,” making its derivative yehgeh refer to a lion’s consistent crying/sobbing.

In explaining the word noer, Rabbi Pappenheim offers a similar explanation. He traces that word to the two-letter root AYIN-REISH, which means “revealing.” Other words that come from this root include ohr (“skin,” i.e. the revealed/visible part of one’s body), ervah (“nakedness,” when a person’s body is revealed), ta’ar (“razor” a blade used for cutting hair and revealing the skin underneath), and ar (an “enemy” who reveals his enmity outwardly). Eir (“awake”) is also derived from this root because when one sleeps, his or her abilities are not readily apparent, but when they awaken, those abilities are suddenly revealed. Building on this last example, Rabbi Pappenheim explains that noer is an audible outburst that a lion suddenly lets out and reveals as being within his repertoire.

Finally, the term nohem, according to Rabbi Pappenheim, derives from the two-letter root HEY-MEM, “storminess” or “chaos.” Other words derived from this root include hamon (“multitudes,” i.e. masses joined together in a stormy or chaotic gathering) and tehomot (“depths of the sea,” where the deep sea waters are wild and stormy). When a lion is nohem, this roar is likewise an outward expression of some sort of inner turmoil and storminess (albeit done more deliberately than when a lion is shoeg).

Rabbi David Chaim Chelouche (1920-2016), the late Chief Rabbi of Netanya, argues that the words nohem and nohek are both derived from the two-letter root NUN-HEY. That root also yields the word nehi (Jer. 9:17-19, 31:14, Amos 5:16, Micha 2:4), which is an onomatopoeic interjection that denotes “sighing.” Rabbi Pappenheim, on the other hand, traces nohek to the monoliteral root KUF, which denotes “expulsion” and from which the biliteral NUN-KUF (“cleaning”) is derived. He consequently explains nohek as audible moaning or sighing intended to “clean/clear” the heart of suffering.

Continue reading…

From Ohr.edu, here.