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No. Such a statement seemingly harbors a cynical view of the Founders.The Founding Fathers placed their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in jeopardy in order to address the abuses of the government. They did NOT limit American democracy in order to “keep” their wealth — they generally had no wealth by 18th century standards. Ministers, teachers, lawyers, and even colonial officials often took their pay in cords of firewood. Many of the founders lived their entire lives in debt.The Constitution defines the U.S. as a Republic, Article 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution. America's founders were wary of aristocracy and monarchy, and preferred a democratic republic. It is governed by rule of law not the will of the majority. The Founders chose a republican form of government rather than a “pure democracy”. No country or nation on earth has ever had an unlimited democracy without falling into chaos. “The key difference between a democracy and a republic lies in the limits placed on government by the law, which has implications for minority rights. Both forms of government tend to use a representational system — i.e., citizens vote to elect politicians to represent their interests and form the government. In a republic, a constitution or charter of rights protects certain inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government, even if it has been elected by a majority of voters. In a "pure democracy," the majority is not restrained in this way and can impose its will on the minority.” Democracy often allows for the tyranny of the majority over the minority. Democracy vs Republic - Difference and ComparisonDiscussion:The Revolution was no more about Tea and Taxes than it was about the RIGHTS of Anglo-Americans “as Englishmen”. Principally, the revolutionary generation was tired of being treated as second class citizens of the empire simply because they lived “across the pond”. The precipitating event of the American Revolution was the attempt of government to take away the arms of the colonials (Lexington and Concord).Yet, money and finances were among the root causes of the revolution. Serious disagreements concerning the powers of government and the Rights of the governed have been and continue to be contested in the marketplace.The colonials were perfectly serious in their belief that taxation by Parliament—or any legislation that affected the colonies and not the general population of the empire without their consent or at least their sufferance — was a violation of their traditional rights and the concept of equality under the law. The dissolution of the New York legislature in 1766 over its negative response to the Stamp Tax seemed to verify America’s worst fears of an impending tyranny.However, many in London considered the colonial arguments simple fabrications designed to avoid paying taxes. Using the idea that the Americans would trump up novel arguments against external taxes as easily as they had against internal ones, Tories in Parliament pressed for new bills with unfortunate similarities to the Stamp Act. It seems certain, however, that everyone in Parliament understood the need to exercise the right to tax America at this time, and many foresaw the colonial ambition to become a nation of independent states creeping over the horizon.The idea that the Revolution was based on the defense of the Rights of Englishmen does not mean that there were not financial concerns among the issues at hand.The Land Bank ControversyIn 1739 a Land Bank was proposed in Massachusetts to help relieve the local cash shortage. The Land Bank was a little known and widely unreported cause of American unrest and dissatisfaction with British governance in Massachusetts and in Boston in particular. Building on the economic ideas of Scottish economist John Law, a number of landowners in Boston — among them Dean Samuel Adams, the elder, the father of Sam Adams, the radical — formed a company and mortgaged their estates to it in exchange for paper notes, giving each investor 3 per cent interest annually in domestically manufactured goods, and 5 per cent on the principal in the same currency. The notes were payable after twenty years, but not before, and circulated like money.Another bank was proposed to counteract the Land Bank. It was called the Specie Bank, and planned to issue ₤120,000 in paper notes redeemable in fifteen years, in silver, at 20s of paper per ounce. Both went into operation, but in 1740, Parliament declared them illegal under the Joint Stock Companies Act, passed after the financial crisis known as the South Sea Bubble (1720). Both banks were fashioned in a manner similar to the questionable South Sea Company (SSC), and therefore were required to wind up their business. [i] However, the directors of the Land Bank, with ₤36 thousands in uncallable notes outstanding, resisted its fate and by social and political intrigues continued its operation. The large merchants of Boston generally refused its notes. However, the small dealers accepted them, and they continued to circulate in lieu of cash. This became a political issue between the friends and enemies of the Land Bank directors, particularly Dean Adams and Lt. Gov. Hutchinson.[ii]After 1740 with the ruling of Parliament at his back, Governor Jonathan Belcher of Massachusetts made war on the Land Bank with all his energy. He declared it unlawful and pernicious, and contrary to the act of Parliament and to his instructions from the Board of Trade. Finding that some civil and military officers in the colony were engaged in the Land Bank, he removed them from service. This called forth protests from Samuel Adams, the younger and others, as an invasion of liberty and an attack on personal property. There also arose a dispute after the elder Adams’ death as to whether the Adams’ estate was indebted to the Land Bank Company, or the Company to the estate. The younger Adams believed that the case had never been fairly and legally heard. Meanwhile, the sheriff of the court, Stephen Greenleaf, considered a creature of Hutchinson, was threatening to auction off the house of the deceased Adams, the Elder — the house in which Sam Adams, the son now lived — to settle what he said were the estate’s obligations. It was from this point that Adams and Hutchinson became implacable opponents — one made penurious and the other prosperous by the acts of Parliament. [iii][i] William Graham Sumner, A History of American Currency, with Chapters on the English Bank Restriction and Austrian Paper Money, to which is appended “The Bullion Report” (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1884). Accessed June 2011. URL: Online Library of Liberty[ii] William Graham Sumner, A History of American Currency, with Chapters on the English Bank Restriction and Austrian Paper Money, to which is appended “The Bullion Report” (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1884). Accessed June 2011. URL: Online Library of Liberty[iii] Ira Stoll, 25.The Money SupplyThe 18th century has been called the long century of imperial scandal, a time when unbridled excess threatened the fundamentals of British politics, culture, and society. An imperial debt in excess of ₤150 millions sterling accumulated through many decades of domestic spending, wartime expenditures, and blatant corruption, especially in the three decades from 1750 to 1770. These imposed a dangerous burden on the British financial system, and Americans were being asked to pay their fair share of the consequences of a profligate and shameless lack of rectitude and integrity overseas in the form of new taxes and duties. Most Americans, and particularly the parsimonious New Englanders, refused to recognize this debt as of their making or within their responsibility to reconcile. They had worked hard and had been honest and abstemious in their business and personal dealings.[i]The British ministry — through specific acts involving coinage and currency, and through financial regulations hidden in other legislation — placed demands for specie payments (gold or silver coins) on the colonies with which the colonies simply could not comply without devastating their own economies. In addition the ministry had declared all paper currency illegal in America in 1751 and 1756 and reissued and expanded its prohibition in the Currency Act of 1764. It can be argued that the Boston Tea Party and the Revolution were less about taxation and the lack of representation and more about the value of money and the unfavorable balance of colonial payments.It is important that the reader realize that 18th-century Americans were novices at capitalism. They literally did not know what it was (even while they practiced and supported many of its fundamental tenets), but they had rather a feeling for the existence of an intrinsic freedom of trade and the liberty to form voluntary business contracts that was at its foundation. Smuggling was often called free trading by those who participated in it, but a marketplace totally free of government intrusion — a so-called free market — was a chimera that was neither identifiable in its characteristics nor totally desirable in its implications. It was, frankly, a largely untried economic system that proved to need some restriction. In a theoretical free market there is no intervention or regulation by the government except to collect taxes for its own support and defense, to provide for the enforcement of private contracts, and to guarantee the ownership of private property. Yet none but the most unsophisticated of partisans would wish to attempt to do business in a market with no guarantees, no structure, and no means of reconciliation. Certain ultra-libertarian groups continue to dismiss these needs today being unaware or oblivious to their ultimate consequences.High among the early foundations of free market concepts were free trade in goods and the absence of restrictions and monetary controls (on the money supply).The world of work in British North America was considerably different from that found in a large European city like London. For one thing the colonial workmen commanded real wages (adjusted for the level of consumer prices) that generally exceeded the wages of their contemporaries in Britain. This benefit was generally due to the lower cost of energy (i.e. firewood) and food in the colonies — not cash in hand. It was easier to pay a year’s rent with a single gold coin than to purchase a side of bacon of a bolt of cloth when there were no copper pennies in circulation and everyone owed money to everyone else with the balances kept on paper accounts. Ministers, teachers, lawyers, and even colonial officials often took their pay in cords of firewood.The poor were a natural source for anti-government sentiment. It was they who the sheriffs of the courts, the city constables, and other administrators of the law threw into jail. It was their property — if they had ever owned any — that the officers of the courts and deputies had seized in lieu of unpaid debts and taxes. Many persons had been thrown into jail for no other reason than a crushing mountain of debt or the fact that they could not produce the silver coins required under the concept of lawful money. Many of these — owed money on the account books by others — had languished there under the insane concept of a debtors’ prison while their friends and relations desperately scrounged about for cash that wasn’t there.Swarms of constables were dispatched to the waterfronts and slums of American cities to hunt out vagrants and loiterers so that they could keep down the cost of public charity. Orphans, abandoned children, and the capable infirmed were sent to the workhouses, if there was room in one, or bound out as indentures for a term of some years.The chief cause of these hard times in New England was attributed to the restrictive trade and currency regulations of 1764. The Boston Post Boy (June 5, 1765) reported that the number of trading vessels clearing for the West Indies was cut to one-fifth those employed before the legislation took effect. Coins had virtually disappeared from circulation, and those who came into possession of a coin hoarded it against the possibility of “bad times”. John Hancock, whose own trading connections were endangered, noted that “times are very bad … in short such is the situation of things here that we do not know who is and who is not safe.”[ii] The Hancock family’s commercial correspondence of this period contained a genuine sentiment bordering on despair, and the Philadelphia merchant, Stephen Collins, repeated the plaintive outlook in many letters to his London creditors, alleging that the wave of colonial bankruptcies were owing to the stagnation of trade brought on by the policies of the government.[iii][i] Nicholas B. Dirks, 9.[ii] Arthur M. Schlesinger, 57. “Colonial Merchants of the American Revolution, 1763-1776.” Internet Achieve. URL: Full text of "The colonial merchants and the American revolution, 1763-1776"[iii] Arthur M. Schlesinger, 68.The Proclamation of 1763The final defeat of the French in America, after four wars and more than seventy years of struggle, was widely celebrated in 1763 as the removal of a great burden on the colonies. Generations of colonial grandfathers, fathers, and sons had fought the French and their Indian allies on the frontiers. However, the thrill of victory was as short-lived. The end of the French and Indian War initiated a severe and unexpected economic crisis, and the attitude of the ministry in London to victory in America seemed incomprehensible. Settlers who had abandoned their frontier farms in panic were explicitly prohibited from returning to them by the Proclamation of 1763, and their property rights annulled.Colonial sensitivities were further assaulted when the line of frontier settlement proposed by the Proclamation of 1763 was “deliberately distorted” by Parliament into a permanent barrier to settlement in 1764. The “undeniable primary principle” of this line was to foster a market for British manufactures along the coastline and to prevent the development of any colonial industry in the interior. Americans soon began to realize that their own best interests were not always those of the Crown. James Otis, writing from the perspective of the seaboard colonials, noted, “The late acquisitions in America, as glorious as they have been, and as beneficial as they are to Great Britain, are only a security to these colonies against the ravages of the French and Indians. Our trade upon the whole is not, I believe, benefited by them one groat.”[i]Imagine the surprise on the frontiers when, no sooner than the French war had ceased, the settlers witnessed a paradox—English merchants’ wagons and pack trains under British licenses carrying arms and ammunition westward for sale to the same tribes who had destroyed their homes.[ii] Matthew Smith and James Gibson responded to this circumstance for the frontiersmen in an open letter to Parliament. Called A Remonstrance from the Pennsylvania Frontiersmen (1764), the letter was published and widely read in the colonies.[i] Samuel Eliot Morison, Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution 1764-1788 and the Formation of the Federal Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), xx.[ii] Neil Harmon Swanson, The First Rebel: Being a Lost Chapter of Our History and a True Narrative (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 54-55.The Stamp Act CrisisThe French and Indian War created a vast debt estimated by the British Exchequer at an unprecedented ₤150 million. An additional annual appropriation of almost ₤2 million was needed for the imperial peace establishment—an army and navy to secure an empire that stretched from Hudson’s Bay in Canada to the Bay of Bengal in India half a globe away. Only ₤350 thousand of this annual expense (approximately 18 percent) was determined to be due to the administration of the American colonies. Although the Parliament expected to pay the lion’s share of future expenditures, the ministry of George Grenville—a Whig who carried over most of the personnel from the Tory government of Lord Bute into his own cabinet—decided to extract at least some of the money, estimated at about ₤60 thousand in 1765, from the colonies in the form of a stamp tax on all legal and business papers, newspapers, printed forms, playing cards, wall paper, and licenses. Different taxes were also specified for deeds or grants of land of less than 100 acres, of 100 to 200 acres, and of 200 to 320 acres.[i]In 18th century an income tax was unthinkable—even for the revenue starved British Empire. Many people in Britain and America opposed an income tax, on principle, believing that the disclosure of personal income was an unacceptable intrusion of government into their private matters, and a potential threat to their personal liberty. Moreover, in Anglo-America the legislation laying internal taxes had always come from the local colonial assemblies. Anglo-Americans were familiar with paying taxes, but even the imperial ministers of the Crown had not proposed the modern expedient of a profit-killing, economy-enervating tax on personal income. That would take the action of a wartime federal government dedicated to resolving the financial crisis brought on by the American Civil War. Not until 1862 would a personal income tax be instituted under Abraham Lincoln as a war measure, and it was done when the southern states had no meaningful representation in Congress to fight it. In 1895 the Supreme Court decided that the income tax was unconstitutional. With progressive politics then in vogue, social reformers demanded the enhanced revenue, and the 16th Amendment to the Constitution made the income tax a permanent fixture in the U.S. tax system in 1913. The stamp tax was clearly the first attempt to levy an internal tax from outside the colonies. “Looking back it is clear that such a tax, being internal instead of external, might raise a storm of protest.”[ii] Along with the passage of the Stamp Act, Parliament renewed the Mutiny Act, which required the colonial assemblies to house and support the troops sent to America. These provisions of the Mutiny Act were known as quartering.[i] Ira Stoll, 40.[ii] James Truslow Adams and Charles Garrett Vannest, The Record of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 83.Pin Money as a Classic ExampleOn the same day that it repealed the Stamp Act, Rockingham passed the Declaratory Act, which stated that Parliament had the total right to legislate any laws governing the American colonies in all cases whatsoever. Seen as a face-saving device, the Declaratory Act seems to have produced little colonial reaction at the time, and the boycott of English goods was generally relaxed. However, at least some of the more radical thinkers in the colonies saw the Declaratory Act as “a statue, laid up for future use, like a sword in a scabbard.” [i]In 1766 Charles Townshend became Lord of the Exchequer, the department of government that levied and collected taxes and duties. Townshend was directly opposed to any policy of caution or moderation with respect to the colonies. He proposed a series of revenue measures to help pay for the administration and security of the colonies and thereby relieve the burden on the British taxpayer in England.The demands made on America might not have been as great had London extended these measures to the entire empire and tapped its resources in India. However, Townshend was a champion of the charter rights of the East India Company and a friend to many of the directors of the company who also served on the Board of Trade. He declared all revenues derived from India to be the property of the company and free from taxation. [Emphasis added]. He further materially reduced the tax burden on landlords in Britain, who he considered “harassed country gentlemen.” This was the 18th century equivalent of giving tax breaks to 21st century millionaires and billionaires. These decisions further increased the portion of the revenues to be derived from America. No course of action by the government in London could have been calculated to more arouse colonial resentment. [ii]There was a good deal of resistance to the passage of the bill in England, and although Townshend died suddenly in 1767, the Townshend Revenue Act “stole through the House; no man knew how.” [iii] The duties were reissued and expanded in 1769 over the protests on a vociferous Whig minority in Parliament, which generally supported the colonial position on taxation for its own political purposes. The duties set taxes on a vast number of “goods and commodities of growth, produce, or manufacture of the British Colonies.” These fell into two groups distinguished as enumerated or non-enumerated.Reams of paper were made so expensive by the duty that colonial newspapers resorted to making their newssheets physically smaller, and the Pennsylvania Chronicle noted that a simple paper of dressmakers’ pins had gone from 10d to 2s (24d), a 140 percent increase, “and other articles were equally high in proportion.” Pins were to be taxed even if they moved across colonial borders. A card of pins would be taxed going from Manhattan to New Jersey that could be clearly seen across the Hudson River. [iv][i] Richard N. Current and John A. Garraty, Words That Made American History, Colonial Times to the 1870’s ( Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), 111.[ii] Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, 216; also see John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1943), 244-246.[iii] James Truslow Adams and Charles Garrett Vannest, 250.[iv] Arthur M. Schlesinger, 211.See:Amazon.com: From Whence the Silver, The Role of Money in Colonial America (Traditional American History Series Book 3) eBook: James M. Volo: Kindle Store