This post appeared on the RenounceUScitizenship blog

Thought I might add this to the “possible ISB” reading list. Niall Ferguson is somewhat of  a “celebrity academic” and author of a number of books including “The Ascent of Money” – which I would highly recommend. In any case, he is also the author of “Empire” which is described as a book about:

“The rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power.”

I would recommend this book as an aid to understanding what is going on in the world today.

Obviously the intention is provide possible lessons for America.

Here is an interview on TVO with the author.

In Liberty’s Exiles, Maya Jasonoff provides a completely different perspective on the American revolution.

In Empire, Mr. Ferguson, like Ms. Jasonoff,  offers a perspective that varies from the U.S government approved version.

Consider this small excerpt:

Everyone has heard of the Boston Tea Party of 16 December 1773, in which 342 boxes of tea worth 10,000 were tipped from the East India tea ship Dartmouth into the murky waters of Boston Harbour. But most people assume it was a protest against a hike in the tax on tea. In fact the price of the tea in question was exceptionally low, since the British Government had just given the East India tea company a rebate of the much higher duty the tea had incurred on entering Britain. In effect the tea left Britain duty free and how to pay only the lower American duty on arriving in Boston. Tea had never been cheaper in New England. The “Party” was organized not by irate consumers but by Boston’s wealthy smugglers, who stood to lose out. Contemporaries were well aware of the absurdity of the ostensible reason for the protest. “Will not posterity be amazed” wrote one sceptic, “when they are told that the present distraction took it’s rise from the Parliament’s taking off a shilling duty on a pound of tea, and imposing three pence, and call it a more unaccountable phrenzy, and more disgraceful to the annals of America, than that of witchcraft”?

– page 72 of paperback edition

In case you didn’t catch that:

What he is saying is the smugglers (who were avoiding all duties) were upset that Parliament lowered duties because it made it harder for the smugglers to compete. Makes one wonder what the American Revolution was really about. Who was really behind it? Might also account for the horrible treatment of the Loyalists (who as Jasonoff describes, were forced to leave).

The victors get to write the history.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the version of American history taught in the public schools to Homelanders is a severe distortion of reality.

Mr. Ferguson’s  suggestion is the American revolution was not necessarily about taxes or liberty. It may have been about furthering the interests of special interest groups. Maybe …

Fast forward to 2013.

FATCA is described as being about tax evasion. Anybody who knows anything about FATCA knows it is not about tax evasion.

The truth is that FATCA is about control and creating an Orwellian world …

It occurs to me that the members of the FATCA Compliance Complex of 2013 are  the intellectual and moral descendents of Boston’s tea smugglers in 1773.