plane's contortions and perversions of history never cease to amaze. Reading his posts in this thread, it sounded to me like his take on the American Revolution was to get Big Government off the backs of the people. Craziest take I ever heard on this. The American Revolution was to get "foreign" government off the backs of the American people, not "Big" government. ("Foreign" in quotes because the "foreign" government they were rebelling against happened to be the one government that had founded, built and defended the nation and provided it with its language, religion, infrastructure and public institutions.) The slogan was "No taxation without representation!" which plane seems to hear only as "No taxation!"
History proves that the American people, like any other people, far from being the mythical nation of self-reliant frontiersmen that politicians like to pretend they are, are in as much need of protection as any other people from greedy businessmen selling unsafe or fraudulent products and fleecing them any way they can get away with, all under the unblinking eyes of the great gods of Capitalism. History proves the NEED for Blue Sky laws, federal regulation of the food and drug industry, federal regulation of the pollution of the environment, etc. To leave all of this to the operation of the marketplace is sheer insanity, and in fact there is no industrialized nation that does so.
There was a genuine fear among the Founding Fathers of an absolutist government and appropriate provisions were made to guard against it, including a brilliant system of checks and balances, but absolutely nothing that would inhibit in any way a vigorous and necessary partisan debate, and certainly nothing that would enable one of the participants to lie with impunity about his situation in life and rely on a non-existent right of privacy in the circumstances to protect his claims from close scrutiny.