British Mistakes, American Honesty

If the English had only dealt with their America colonies a little more wisely, chances are that places like New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio would still be part of the British Empire. Americans, at first, did not want independence from England: they merely wanted equal representation in parliament, and their rights as Englishmen under the Magna Carta. But instead, writes Jack Rakove (at Stanford University),

it took a peculiarly flawed process of framing bad policies and reacting to the resulting failures to convince the government of George III and Lord North that the best way to maintain the loyalty of their North American subjects was to make war on them.

Pushed toward the radical step of declaring independence, the Founding Fathers were actually, in the words of John M. Taylor (George Washington University),

two sets of leaders - an older group that led the move for independence, including Washington and the Adamses, and a younger group, including Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who came of age with it.

But both groups shared one characteristic, as Rakove sums it up:

For the revolutionaries of 1776, virtue meant the ability of citizens to subordinate private interest to public good.

This same quality can create hope in the future of any nation, including ours - as we begin the twenty-first century burdened with national government debt and outrageously high taxes, we can still find a good future, if we are willing to accept healthy cuts to government spending. We will have to set aside our "private interest" in getting something "for free" from the government - the pain of which is lessened somewhat by remembering that it isn't really "for free" if every American, from richest to poorest, is paying such high taxes - and work toward the "public good": reducing debt, reducing deficit, and reducing taxes.