Bundy and his Tea Party and Libertarian supporters envision America as some kind of historical anarchy. Laws are apparently tyranny in his view. And everything he has he did entirely on his own.
Benjamin Franklin, without whom we may not have ever achieved independence, had an entirely different view of property and taxes. Here is what he wrote in 1783:
16
Property
CHAPTER 16
|Document 12Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris
25 Dec. 1783
Writings 9:138
The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly
blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so.
I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance
against giving Congress a Power to take, as they
call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only
to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted.
They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from
the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the
Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be
compell'd to pay by some Law.All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
The Founders' Constitution
Volume 1, Chapter 16, Document 12
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12.html
The University of Chicago Press
The Writings of Benjamin Franklin. Edited by Albert Henry Smyth. 10 vols. New York: Macmillan Co., 1905--7.
Easy to print version.
© 1987 by The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved. Published 2000
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/
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