Crucial American tax history via Canada

Stefan Molyneux is an unusual fellow. He has gained an international following simply by doing up Youtubes of himself speaking on issues of the day easily racking up 30, 40, 50 or 90 thousand views. (I feel certain one is in the high six figures but can't find it.)

His material is not all sane by any means, but is generally populist and right-on. Here's a marathon on the "father of our country" by this Canadian that I urge you to view, or at least hear in the background of your work day. Get ready to lose a lot of respect for our first official president -- at least temporarily. Think of it as a visit to a strange, faraway world -- in a sense, it is, that of unvarnished reality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkwZDRB3tZo
The Truth About George Washington

Before digits, you'd have to pay some professor in an expensive university to dole this exact same information and sourcing out in 50-minute intervals, then torture out of you by testing what you've retained of it. Thanks to the net, you get the same exact material (and much, MUCH better) free of charge in whatever dose you wish, any hour of the day or night. Yes, there are trainloads of lies, misinfo and disinfo out there but any adult whose absorbed formal schooling will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

As you know if you've been following my modest punditry, most of the "common knowledge" on things is IMHO upside-down and backwards. There have been rumors and whisperings of George Washington's evils forever. Knowing the human condition and mentality I've had no trouble believing they could be well-founded.

A particular revelation came some years ago with the discovery (via internet, natch!) that the Whiskey Rebellion was in fact huge grab for power and money by Washington (the man and the capitol). The good news there was that the real rebellion was on the part of individual brewers across the land and in particular rural Dixie. They simply refused to knuckle under to the federal assault, and kept doing business the way they always had. I wrote this up for a chronicle I was doing at the time for the Nationalist Times print newspaper (still in existence).

In the present video, Molyneux traces among many other things how excessive taxation, the thing over which our ancestors revolted, grew with little resistance in the course of Washington's life and work. The killer is around the 2:30 mark where our speaker starts summing up how the failure of citizens to burn these weeds off the political landscape morphed into the Federal Reserve 114 years after Washington's death and how this expressly led to America's involvement in World War I, since the former enabled the printing of money to finance the latter.

Don't feel too glum as Stefan's going after the slave issue, however -- "our" Northern states were also ghoulishly slave-driven. Slavery was indeed probably more brutal up there than down here. The African Burial Ground National Monument is in New York City, not Richmond or Birmingham. Don't be fooled by the name -- it's an actual potter's field of slave bones, many of them showing pitiful signs of physical abuse and neglect during life! And this was nothing isolated -- Connecticut, New Jersey and other states realms were rife with black slave plantations.

Stefan is still emerging from a PC consciousness (aren't we all) so he probably has no idea of all that yet. Only God knows how much of this talk of his is factual; if much, let's rejoice that amerika is still as functional as it is, insofar as this can be said. After so much voodoo and vampirism by our admired heroes, it's a wonder that groceries are passably affordable and we have the freedom to read and write all this.

/\/.\/\/.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Burial_Ground_National_Monument