Page 1 of 2

Communism, pilgrims and minuteman (rescued from testing)

Posted: 2011-02-25 09:27am
by J
I think I finally understand America. :(


http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2281849
The Truth About Thanksgiving


A reprise from my personal blog in 2006, before The Ticker began publication...

Ok folks, in commemoration of Thanksgiving, while I sit here trying to figure out how eating a plate full of turkey has suddenly made me feel like I gained 10lbs (it couldn't have been the stuffing, fixings and cookies, could it?) I thought I'd put this out there to dispel some of the myths surrounding this holiday.

As we are told, the first settlers to this country (from Europe, natch) faced a horrible first winter, lost many of their people, and the native Americans (aka "Indians") that were here helped them the following year and thus they were able to survive and ultimately prosper. They gave thanks for their harvest and invited their Indian friends to dinner.

Well, ok, that's part of the story.

Now let's talk about the rest.

The colonists did not have money, of course. Merchants in London paid for their journey, but this put each of the colonists heavily into debt - a debt which they intended to pay off through their fruits in the New World and, they hoped, through the discovery of gold.

There was no gold (well, not on the east coast anyway.) Before the colonists arrived in Cape Cod they penned the Mayflower Compact, which you can find at The Mayflower Compact

You might recognize some of the language in that document - it is strikingly similar to the writings of Carl Marx many years later!


In part, it read: "....And by Virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."

The first winter was disasterous - nearly half of the Pilgrims died of starvation, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Many claim that Bradford's first wife perished that first winter, but that is not quite true - she actually fell off the Mayflower quite close to land and drowned, never making it to Plymouth (he later remarried.)

During the first two years the colony lived under what could only be called Communism, enshrined in the Mayflower Compact. Each person was accorded a "share" of the totality of what was produced at the colony, and each person was expected to do their part in working toward the common good. The land, and that upon it, was owned by the colony as a collective.

It not only did not work out, it nearly killed them all.

William Bradford wrote in his diary "For in this instance, community of property (so far as it went) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit and comfort. For the young men who were most able and fit for service objected to being forced to spend their time and strength in working for other men’s wives and children, without any recompense. The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could. This was thought injustice.”

After the second winter, realizing that the colony had survived only through the friendship and largesse of the native Americans, and would soon perish if changes were not made, Bradford tore up the Mayflower Compact. He instead assigned each family a plot of land to be their property, to be worked as the family saw fit, and with the fruits of that land to be their own. It was the beginning of private property rights in the New World.

The result? Again, from his diary: "It made all hands very industrious, so that much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could devise, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better satisfaction.”

From the very day that Bradford tore up the Mayflower Compact, Plymouth began to prosper. Within a year the colonists found themselves with more food than they could eat. Flush with a bountiful harvest far in excess of their need for food and having bartered for all the goods they needed to get through the winter, they had a feast of thanks with their Indian trading partners.

Within a couple of years the colonists paid off their debt to the London Merchants and became, in fact, free men.

The story - and reason - for their success is not told in our government schools, for were every American child to be made aware of precisely why we have this nation today, and to understand just how close this country came to extinction 150 years before the Revolution, they would grow up understanding exactly how dangerous liberal and socialist thought - and the punishment of industry and capital through punitive tax policies - truly is.

Today, we live in a society that is increasingly suspect of private property rights. We no longer own our property, we effectively lease it through ad-valorem property taxes. Our right to keep to ourselves or consume as we see fit the fruits of our labor is increasingly taxed away and given to others, who do not work for their rewards at all. Nearly half of all in the United States today can in fact "vote for a living", in that they pay no federal income taxes at all, and a good percentage are actually paid to exist through the Earned Income Credit.

When Plymouth Colony was founded, the population was small and the effects of such foolishness immediately apparent. When you only have 150 people, half of them dying is by no stretch catastrophic, and immediately obvious.

This evening as we eat our feasts, let us not forget what Thanksgiving is truly for giving thanks for. It is not that the Indians saved the colonists from certain starvation.

No, it is that one man - William Bradford - saw the wisdom of private property and free enterprise, and the folly of socialist society, and through his wisdom - far before the Founding Fathers - he took action to save his people and lay the groundwork for what would become America.


As we loll around the house this evening, plump with our turkey feast, let us hold in our hearts that much of what we have in this nation does not comport with this very basic, fundamental principle. Our Constitution, written by men far wiser than us, has been twisted, contorted and tortured to permit all manner of socialism and communist action in the guise of "the greater good", whether it be Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, government schools or prescription drug cards - and that it is our duty, as citizens of this great land, to do that which is necessary - and possible - to turn away from that which has, in the course of human events, been proven never to succeed.

Finally, make sure you tell your children the truth about Thanksgiving, for they are the future, and without the truth about the past, cannot be expected to make good decisions as they grow up in the world.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-25 10:04am
by Eleas
I was prepared to do a point-by-point on this, but the wind just left me. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-25 10:46am
by Crossroads Inc.
Eleas wrote:I was prepared to do a point-by-point on this, but the wind just left me. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
They can't be wrong.

The whole existance is based upon a series of lies that ALL socialisim is wrong, that ALL notions of Liberalism is wrong, that DA LORD and hard work is all we ever needed to become the BEST GOD DAMN NATION ON EARTH!

To admit a single flaw, such as that the first American colony was based in socialism, or that they were saved by filthy dirty natives, would call into question their whole existance.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-25 01:18pm
by Skgoa
So "antisocial idiots don't work towards their common survival == communism is evil"? :lol:

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-25 04:56pm
by Simon_Jester
Well, arguably this is the same lesson the Soviets learned with collective farms later on: at the microeconomic level of individual workers whose "means of production" are limited to the necessary tools required for them to perform their own personal labor, letting them own those tools, taking personal responsibility for their use and standing or falling by how well they use them, is a pretty good idea.

Thus, private plots for farmers, private shops for tailors who work on their own, and so on... these things really are not part of the "capitalism" that Marx saw as a threat. Nor is it particularly practical for even the most committed communist society to remove all these items- you can do it but it doesn't work very well, especially without someone holding a gun to the collective farm's head to make them produce.

What normal socialism, as opposed to retarded-extremist-version socialism, tends to focus on are larger 'means of production:' industrial machinery and infrastructure that, by nature, exist in small numbers so that you can't give one to everybody. You can't distribute steel mills uniformly among the population*, you can't give everyone their own hospital to take care of them when they're sick, and so on. There will never be enough of these for everyone to own and use one as part of routine existence.

Therefore, socialism argues, these things of which there isn't enough to go around should be held by the collective- the commune, the people, the state, whatever. Moreover, property of which there is enough to go around should be distributed so that everybody has some: every farmer should have their own land instead of being a sharecropper, for instance.

This can, obviously, be taken to ridiculous extremes- when land is first taken away from the village headman and given to the peasants... only to be taken away from the peasants and administered by a new, communist party headman in the name of the abstract 'people.' That's the retarded extremist version of socialism, which people are rationally afraid of.

And, of course, America does not recognize the difference between 'normal' and 'retarded extremist version' socialism.
_______

*Tried by retarded-extremist-version socialists, failed.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-25 05:48pm
by Spoonist
Simon_Jester wrote:And, of course, America does not recognize the difference between 'normal' and 'retarded extremist version' socialism.
Even though america does have a larger part of the portion there is still enough for everyone to get their fair share. Most lolbertarians, right wing extremists, christian democrats or conservatives in most european countries have the same dyslexia.

Not to forget our resident southamerican economic genius Iosef Cross and other such esteemed boardmembers.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-26 12:12am
by Winston Blake
they would grow up understanding exactly how dangerous liberal and socialist thought - and the punishment of industry and capital through punitive tax policies - truly is.
I like the part where a 'tragedy of the commons' automatically implies 'liberal thought' (abortion? racism?) and 'punitive taxes'.

I also like the part where '150 people try communism, which causes poor living conditions, which is then addressed by instituting private property' shows once and for all that unfettered capitalism is the way, the truth, and the light. The part a bit later on, where oh a few million people suffer poor living conditions in the Great Depression, which is then addressed by instituting Social Security / etc, means absolutely nothing.
Our Constitution, written by men far wiser than us,
I wonder if this fundamental attitude accounts for American anti-intellectualism. If all intellectual greatness is assumed to lie in the distant past, then any new thought is an affront to the entire nation. Could any American, ever, be considered 'wiser' than the Founding Fathers?

---

Here's a thought - from the point of view of an outsider, almost everything Americans hold to be grand, impressive philosophical and moral truths are actually just natural products of their colonial history:

They were a colonial nation which was (1) subordinate to a central authority which (2) owned all property (the Crown), (3) demanded loads of taxes, and (4) had absolute power over life and liberty. Then they fought (5) a war of independence against Britain using (6) many private arms.

So they decided to (1) put limits on central authority, (2) institute private property, (3) keep central taxes to a minimum, (4) declare certain rights to life and liberty etc to be 'self-evident' and 'universal', (5) put enormous emphasis and pride on their military, and finally (6) made sure the new central authority couldn't take away their private arms.

And yet these basic attitudes have grown into overcomplicated cancerous caricatures of themselves, full of unwarranted self-importance. In fact, they are generally harming the nation they were created to protect.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-26 01:56am
by Spoonist
Winston Blake wrote:They were a colonial nation which was (1) subordinate to a central authority which (2) owned all property (the Crown), (3) demanded loads of taxes, and (4) had absolute power over life and liberty. Then they fought (5) a war of independence against Britain using (6) many private arms.
IIRC 2, 3, 4 and 6 are false.
Care to back them up? (Not a demand, more of a please enlighten me if you can be bothered')
Although I agree that modern teabaggers believe those things.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-26 03:55am
by Winston Blake
Spoonist wrote:
Winston Blake wrote:They were a colonial nation which was (1) subordinate to a central authority which (2) owned all property (the Crown), (3) demanded loads of taxes, and (4) had absolute power over life and liberty. Then they fought (5) a war of independence against Britain using (6) many private arms.
IIRC 2, 3, 4 and 6 are false.
Care to back them up? (Not a demand, more of a please enlighten me if you can be bothered')
Although I agree that modern teabaggers believe those things.
It's hard for me to back them up because I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect and I haven't actually studied American history. It was a thought. The taxes thing is pretty clear cut - clearly the colonists thought they were excessive, in the absence of representation.

2 & 4 are basically de jure things, where Britain owned all its colonies and theoretically all legitimacy and power flows from the monarch. All that is then disseminated throughout the government. Laws etc are merely conveniences 'at the pleasure' of the monarch. I don't actually know for sure if this was Britain's philosophy prior to American independence - however IIRC the Founding Fathers were big on 'the law is the king' vs 'the king is the law'.

About 6, that's the impression I got from all the Second Amendment hoo-hah. The whole 'American Minutemen getting the call, grabbing their firearms off the wall and riding off to war in working-man clothes' sort of thing. I'm open to being told that the revolutionaries were issued govmt weapons. As I said, I haven't studied American history.

In fact, talking about this has forced me to realise that most of what I know about American history has been absorbed from American film/TV and political debates, and thus is probably quite sketchy. Really, if you're American, it's me who should be asking you to please enlighten me if you can be bothered.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-26 05:22am
by Ritterin Sophia
Winston Blake wrote:About 6, that's the impression I got from all the Second Amendment hoo-hah. The whole 'American Minutemen getting the call, grabbing their firearms off the wall and riding off to war in working-man clothes' sort of thing. I'm open to being told that the revolutionaries were issued government weapons. As I said, I haven't studied American history.
The 'Minutemen' were at best able to stalemate the British regulars, more often they were routed by them, the thing about the minutemen was that they weren't uniformed and could wait until the British left town to 'persuade' loyalists to leave. The majority of successes by the revolutionary forces were due to the Continental Army. The Continental Army were trained by von Steuben with equipment and arms provided to the nascent government by the French.
In fact, talking about this has forced me to realise that most of what I know about American history has been absorbed from American film/TV and political debates, and thus is probably quite sketchy. Really, if you're American, it's me who should be asking you to please enlighten me if you can be bothered.
The quick and dirty is that the 'Minutemen' are vastly overrated, the militia system was a total failure but it was easier to drum up support by making everyone feel responsible for the win. The Continental Army 'won' through dint of perseverance, the methods the British would need to win the war could've turned the entirety of the British colonies in North America and abroad against them, something they couldn't risk for so little gain.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-26 09:37pm
by J
Eleas wrote:Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
The person who wrote that rant is a registered Republican residing in Florida. I believe that covers everything.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-27 04:00am
by Simon_Jester
Spoonist wrote:
Winston Blake wrote:They were a colonial nation which was (1) subordinate to a central authority which (2) owned all property (the Crown), (3) demanded loads of taxes, and (4) had absolute power over life and liberty. Then they fought (5) a war of independence against Britain using (6) many private arms.
IIRC 2, 3, 4 and 6 are false.
Care to back them up? (Not a demand, more of a please enlighten me if you can be bothered')
Although I agree that modern teabaggers believe those things.
From what I've heard (and I'd have to e-mail one of my college history professors and wait a while to get a well-developed explanation of this), the problem with (3) wasn't the tax rate. It was the limited ability of the colonies to pay taxes.

This was a pre-industrial society; taxes from the colonies were collected in specie: gold and silver currency, because the British treasury couldn't very well collect grain or chickens from scattered colonists three thousand miles away. But British trade regulations prohibited colonial goods from being sold except to British merchants, the British themselves tended to keep prices as low as possible, and there were no gold or silver mines in the North American colonies.

So you had a situation where:
-Gold and silver flowed steadily out of North America to pay taxes to Britain.
-Gold and silver could not flow into North America from non-British merchants because of the Navigation Acts.
-Gold and silver flowed into north America from British merchants only slowly, which was a feature, not a bug, of the mercantilist policies of the time.
-There were no sources of gold and silver in the colonies.

At this point, it's quite predictable that you'd see deflation in the colonies. The money supply shrank, which hit debtors hard. And that included both large numbers of small farmers on the frontier, and much of the colonial upper class.

At the same time, the British government's enforcement of the new taxes tended to be ham-handed and obnoxious. Broad policies were set by Parliament, which was hopelessly remote from the actual scene of events and had virtually no accurate information on conditions in the colonies. Narrow policies were set by appointed officials who kept running roughshod over the institutions the colonists had developed to govern themselves over the past century and a half.

Thus, the taxes became extremely unpopular and were seen as excessive, even if they were not out of line compared to the taxes paid by British citizens in Britain itself. The practical differences between the colonial and British home economies, many of them imposed by British laws, gave the colonists very good reasons to object to the taxation scheme developed by Parliament in the 1760s and 1770s.
General Schatten wrote:
Winston Blake wrote:About 6, that's the impression I got from all the Second Amendment hoo-hah. The whole 'American Minutemen getting the call, grabbing their firearms off the wall and riding off to war in working-man clothes' sort of thing. I'm open to being told that the revolutionaries were issued government weapons. As I said, I haven't studied American history.
The 'Minutemen' were at best able to stalemate the British regulars, more often they were routed by them, the thing about the minutemen was that they weren't uniformed and could wait until the British left town to 'persuade' loyalists to leave. The majority of successes by the revolutionary forces were due to the Continental Army. The Continental Army were trained by von Steuben with equipment and arms provided to the nascent government by the French.
Point one: this neglects the popular perception of the war, in which the militia played a far more prominent role than they did if you view the war as nothing but a series of battles between the Continental Army and the redcoats.

Point two: this also neglects the strategic realities the British faced because of the militia. While a formed British unit could brush aside a formed militia unit easily enough, the existence of widespread militia formations made occupying territory difficult. The British controlled only the territory they had redcoats physically standing on, while the colonists and their militias controlled all the rest, and prevented small British garrisons from safely holding down territory not occupied by the main armies.

Thus, the British were forced to march their armies up and down the length of the colonies, trying somehow to pacify the population, and failing. Their defeat was inevitable even if it took a formed, European-trained and equipped Continental Army to do the job. And the existence of widespread colonial militias* did a lot to make the defeat inevitable.

If it had been purely a contest between the Continental and Regular armies, the Continentals would have lost- they had inferior weapons and training even with European aid. Support of the populations, including its guerillas, militants, and local militias, made the war winnable for them.

*(whether armed with personal weapons, or more often with stockpiled weapons bought by local governments for militia armories)
In fact, talking about this has forced me to realise that most of what I know about American history has been absorbed from American film/TV and political debates, and thus is probably quite sketchy. Really, if you're American, it's me who should be asking you to please enlighten me if you can be bothered.
The quick and dirty is that the 'Minutemen' are vastly overrated, the militia system was a total failure but it was easier to drum up support by making everyone feel responsible for the win. The Continental Army 'won' through dint of perseverance, the methods the British would need to win the war could've turned the entirety of the British colonies in North America and abroad against them, something they couldn't risk for so little gain.
The problem is that you can't reduce the war to "who won at Yorktown and Saratoga?" The underlying strategic reality- that the British simply could not control any significant amount of colonial territory because only large, formed bodies of troops could operate safely for long without being mobbed- had a great deal to do with the British defeat.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-27 09:15am
by Spoonist
@Simon Jester
Please note that I am by no means an expert here, heck I'd be hardpressed placing the american revultion in its correct decade without the internet. Just that I've seen/read similar views being discredited by better educated folks than me.
So I did some googling and while I couldn't find an article discrediting the old and presenting evidence for the new view I did find books like this one:
isbn 0-631-22141-7
p216 google books
(Had to rewrite since I couldn't copy so any misspelling is mine).
"The condition used to be attributed to a chronic inbalance of payments with Britain, but modern scholars have largely discounted this interpretation. Although exports to the mother country often equaled only half the value of imports, the imbalance was generally corrected by colonial surpluses on trade with the West Indies and southern Europe." It has a footnote so interested folks can check it out.
The lack of specie argument also have extremely little support in the writings of both the founding fathers et al but also the contemporary historians at the time. It seems that it only becomes a meme a generation or so later. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
You see what I do know is that the whole british empire was chronically inflicted by a lack of specie as was the french but to a lesser degree, so it was not an american thing but a universal thing. Only Spain had enough for the extreme growth of trade. For them not to take that into account would mean that we would have seen similar stuff all over the commonwealth. Something which we don't.

So I don't buy it. It can only be seen as an extra burden by afterthought, not while it was happening. I continue below but if you spot any errors or oversimplifications please let me know, I'm always interested in correcting any false views I have.
Simon_Jester wrote:
Spoonist wrote:
Winston Blake wrote:(3) demanded loads of taxes
IIRC 2, 3, 4 and 6 are false.
From what I've heard (and I'd have to e-mail one of my college history professors and wait a while to get a well-developed explanation of this), the problem with (3) wasn't the tax rate. It was the limited ability of the colonies to pay taxes.
Nope. The taxes was paid almost always on time etc. There was never any conflict between crown and colonies whether they were paid or not. The conflict was about which taxes could and should be levied on the colonies unilaterally.
However the wars in the americas took a lot of inventiveness to finance. Where the colonies invented new scheemes with parliament legeslating it away time and again. With more resentment from the colonies.
Simon_Jester wrote:This was a pre-industrial society; taxes from the colonies were collected in specie: gold and silver currency, because the British treasury couldn't very well collect grain or chickens from scattered colonists three thousand miles away. .
I believe this to be flawed. It could not collect what didn't exist. If what your friend says is true the colonies would not just be short on specie they wouldn't have any at all plus being seriously in debt and attacked by crown tax collectors. Since that didnt happen it must have been solved in another way. Probably by IOUs between trading companies etc.
Can your friend back it up? It sounds like a lies to children lesson as Pratchet calls it.
Simon_Jester wrote:But British trade regulations prohibited colonial goods from being sold except to British merchants, the British themselves tended to keep prices as low as possible, and there were no gold or silver mines in the North American colonies.
Mercantilism worked so good elsewhere that they built a global empire around the concept (and the spanish/french/dutch/etc). I fail to see the relevance of repeating how it works.
All of the famous eastindia companies worked on the same principle.
Simon_Jester wrote:1-Gold and silver flowed steadily out of North America to pay taxes to Britain.
2-Gold and silver could not flow into North America from non-British merchants because of the Navigation Acts.
3-Gold and silver flowed into north America from British merchants only slowly, which was a feature, not a bug, of the mercantilist policies of the time.
4-There were no sources of gold and silver in the colonies.
IIRC
1-A "lies-to children" in that it didn't deplete local specie. It just prevented its growth.
2-A half-truth where it should have but didn't because smuggling was so prevalent. Lots of the specie in the colonies (just like the rest of the world) was pieces of eight.
3-Agreed, but it was not deemed as a bad thing at the time. The setting of the prices from London was on the other hand seen as a bad thing at the time. So again a "lies-to-children" concept.
4-Agreed but again with a nitpick. There was 'not enough' sources of gold and silver in the colonies, and even if there were the colonies couldn't create legal specie that way since minting was only allowed in London (at the tower IIRC). for the brit emp to allow a colony to mint its own money would have been seen as insane at the time.
Simon_Jester wrote:At this point, it's quite predictable that you'd see deflation in the colonies. The money supply shrank, which hit debtors hard. And that included both large numbers of small farmers on the frontier, and much of the colonial upper class.
Again I think this is flawed and backwards reasoning. The deflation in 1760s was because of the just finished war against french+natives, which had led to lots of paper money which then deflated vs printed worth. It was a reason for dissent yes, but not as you imply something which is 'predicted' by those points you give above.
Simon_Jester wrote:Broad policies were set by Parliament, which was hopelessly remote from the actual scene of events and had virtually no accurate information on conditions in the colonies.
Agreed that this was how it was felt in the 13 colonies. That was however not really accurate. It would be more accurate to say that the enlightened americans no longer understood the empire. (and rightly so) They were too far away from parliament to understand why those laws/measures were put in place. (Which representation would have solved ironicly enough).
Even when the americans agreed in principle with a specific tax they didn't agree with its formulation or stipulations. Or as in some of the shutting down of the paper money schemes in the colonies it was because similar schemes in other parts of the world had bombed and led to disasters. Something which the americans didn't care about because they of course only saw to their situation.
Simon_Jester wrote:Thus, the taxes became extremely unpopular and were seen as excessive, even if they were not out of line compared to the taxes paid by British citizens in Britain itself. The practical differences between the colonial and British home economies, many of them imposed by British laws, gave the colonists very good reasons to object to the taxation scheme developed by Parliament in the 1760s and 1770s.
Here I agree fully.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-27 09:39am
by Spoonist
@simon Jester
Regarding the Minutemen, you should argue your case against Samuel Adams, Charles Lee and George Washington all who argue against what you say. Pick their arguments apart first and then come back to us.

But more importantly the whole concept is bogus in context. The war was won by the support of the French. Without them no victory is possible. Its ignorant on a huge scale to claim that the minutemen or any such lightly armed militia could have played any significant role vs the british empire.

Which is the important lesson regarding this stupid meme.

Did they make a difference? Yes.
Where they important or did they even live up to the expectations of their creators? No.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-27 11:58am
by Rommel123
It's probably due to "Evil commies" propaganda tool from Cold War.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-28 11:07am
by Thanas
The minuteman were laughable. History shows time and time again what happens when a widely popular rebellion tries to go up against professional forces without having any professional forces themselves. They get crushed. See France etc. Even the best "minuteman" in history, the Spanish guerilla, only managed to bleed, but not defeat Napoleon.

Even their "greatest triumph", the battle of Bunker Hill, just shows their utter ineptitude. They had near parity of numbers, fortified positions, superior intelligence. And the British even did them the favor by assaulting frontally (clinton argued for the smart thing, cutting of the retreat and then starving them out, but the other great generals, a truly astounding feat of British intelligence and bravery, decided to outvote him) and without sufficient strength, as well as wasting most of their artillery.

And the minuteman were still forced to flee, due to their inefficiency as marksmen and utter lack of bayonet training. When the battle should have gone the other way. Look up the seven years war on what happenes when even the best troops of their day assaulted a professional enemy who had cover.

Had there been one regiment of professional troops among the minuteman, the British may very well have lost the battle.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-28 11:32am
by spaceviking
Well, arguably this is the same lesson the Soviets learned with collective farms later on: at the microeconomic level of individual workers whose "means of production" are limited to the necessary tools required for them to perform their own personal labor, letting them own those tools, taking personal responsibility for their use and standing or falling by how well they use them, is a pretty good idea.
Um, didn't Russians peasants work in collectives (Mir) long before the Soviets?

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-28 01:49pm
by Patrick Degan
The article is drivel. The failure of the colony's agriculture in that first winter had a lot more to do with their ignorance of basic farming than collectivism. That the colonists switched economic models has little bearing on the success they derived from following the advice of the local indian tribe on which crops to plant and when. Finally, it's almost certain that the larger mass of Americans knew virtually nothing about the details of the Mayflower Compact when the Federal government began its all-out assault on any organisation, publication, or individual who remotely smacked of socialist advocacy and turned socialism and communism into dirty words in American parlance. In short, Americans hate communism primarily because they've been propagandised against it for over seventy years.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-28 06:51pm
by Tanasinn
spaceviking wrote:
Well, arguably this is the same lesson the Soviets learned with collective farms later on: at the microeconomic level of individual workers whose "means of production" are limited to the necessary tools required for them to perform their own personal labor, letting them own those tools, taking personal responsibility for their use and standing or falling by how well they use them, is a pretty good idea.
Um, didn't Russians peasants work in collectives (Mir) long before the Soviets?
Yes, but pre-Soviet peasant communes were organic and set up to feed the local community. Soviet governmental ones, not so much - IIRC, they were also expected to 'turn a profit' in crops outside of what they grew to feed the community. The result was anything from annoyance to outrage among the peasantry, who mostly didn't know or care what Marxism was and just needed to farm to eat. It was a disappointment to the bolsheviks, who thought peasants were already partly on their was to socialism.

Admittedly, my memory on this is quite fuzzy.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-02-28 07:27pm
by MarshalPurnell
The mir distributed land, not food. Individual peasant families worked their own plots that were assigned by the village communally. Theoretically every family in the village had equally productive plots out of the available communal land, with some turn-around every year to account for various factors. The collective agriculture of the Soviet Union was a true collective enterprise, where every worker farmed for the greater cooperative, which took all production to be redistributed by the state. Of course most collective workers still had very small private plots but those were closer to gardens than farms and they had to be worked on their own time.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-03-01 01:59am
by Simon_Jester
Spoonist wrote:@Simon Jester
Please note that I am by no means an expert here, heck I'd be hardpressed placing the american revultion in its correct decade without the internet. Just that I've seen/read similar views being discredited by better educated folks than me.
So I did some googling and while I couldn't find an article discrediting the old and presenting evidence for the new view I did find books like this one:
isbn 0-631-22141-7
p216 google books
(Had to rewrite since I couldn't copy so any misspelling is mine).
"The condition used to be attributed to a chronic inbalance of payments with Britain, but modern scholars have largely discounted this interpretation. Although exports to the mother country often equaled only half the value of imports, the imbalance was generally corrected by colonial surpluses on trade with the West Indies and southern Europe." It has a footnote so interested folks can check it out.
The lack of specie argument also have extremely little support in the writings of both the founding fathers et al but also the contemporary historians at the time. It seems that it only becomes a meme a generation or so later. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Perhaps my history professor was a loon. I will not attempt to defend his argument on this issue. I can see, and will expand, on why it makes sense to me in theory. But I cannot prove that it was a problem and would not presume to dispute scholarly papers which assert that deflation was not a problem in the colonial economy.
You see what I do know is that the whole british empire was chronically inflicted by a lack of specie as was the french but to a lesser degree, so it was not an american thing but a universal thing. Only Spain had enough for the extreme growth of trade. For them not to take that into account would mean that we would have seen similar stuff all over the commonwealth. Something which we don't.
A chronic, universal lack of specie would tend to strike with disproportionate force in places where imperial policy was draining specie away from the economy the fastest. If everyone is short on silver, and the government policy is to remove silver from the colonies and concentrate it in the homeland, the colonies will suffer greater, more rapid deflation than the homeland.
So I don't buy it. It can only be seen as an extra burden by afterthought, not while it was happening. I continue below but if you spot any errors or oversimplifications please let me know, I'm always interested in correcting any false views I have.
It occurs to me that a province does not need to know why imperial policy is causing a famine to revolt because of the famine. If the colonial economy is in chaos (for any reason) and the imperial government continues to draw taxes from the colony, a revolt becomes quite likely.
Simon_Jester wrote:From what I've heard (and I'd have to e-mail one of my college history professors and wait a while to get a well-developed explanation of this), the problem with (3) wasn't the tax rate. It was the limited ability of the colonies to pay taxes.
Nope. The taxes was paid almost always on time etc. There was never any conflict between crown and colonies whether they were paid or not. The conflict was about which taxes could and should be levied on the colonies unilaterally.
However the wars in the americas took a lot of inventiveness to finance. Where the colonies invented new scheemes with parliament legeslating it away time and again. With more resentment from the colonies.
I think you misunderstand my point. It's not about "should taxes be paid?" it's about "can we keep paying these taxes without gutting the economy?" Or "will my business be able to pay these taxes and still run enough of a profit that I can keep paying my debts to the Bank of England?"

This could be tricky in the colonies, where people had more need to get 'inventive' with financial issues because they were colonies: they had a lot of land, but not a lot of highly valuable economic goods- especially a lack of cash crops that sold as well as sugar from the Caribbean or furs from Canada. Getting silver to pay debts with was harder than getting land-backed securities as paper money to pay debts with, so naturally the colonies tried to establish "land banks" that would print money backed by real estate securities; that's what they had.

Parliament then proceeded to legislate the land banks away, as you say. This left the colonial economy in bad shape- again, hamhanded enforcement of policies that originated from people who had relatively little detailed knowledge of the realities on the ground in the colonies. Which is just a practical concern: when the colony is three months' travel from home, you're not going to have intimate detailed knowledge of what's going on there.
Simon_Jester wrote:This was a pre-industrial society; taxes from the colonies were collected in specie: gold and silver currency, because the British treasury couldn't very well collect grain or chickens from scattered colonists three thousand miles away.
I believe this to be flawed. It could not collect what didn't exist. If what your friend says is true the colonies would not just be short on specie they wouldn't have any at all plus being seriously in debt and attacked by crown tax collectors. Since that didnt happen it must have been solved in another way. Probably by IOUs between trading companies etc.
My 'friend' is Dr. Terry Bouton, of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where I took a 400-level course on the history of the American Revolution. Not a place where you'd expect to see "lies to children," especially since in the same course Bouton was rather brutal about dismantling the myth of the Founding Fathers as ideal disinterested heroes, pointing out that the colonial upper class had very real, concrete interests at stake, which they did everything in their power to promote in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era.

Now, for all I know Dr. Bouton is full of shit... but I'm not going to be the one to prove it.

If I had to, I could e-mail him and request a reference to papers on the issue or something. But I am reluctant to bother him over a random Internet discussion, though I realize this leaves me in an awkward position so far as the debate goes.

As to the practical question, often the colonial governments would simply print paper money as legal tender within their own respective colonies. Moreover, it is a gross misunderstanding of my position to read it as "there was NO specie in the colonies." There was some; goods exported to England were paid for in silver, and I'm sure there was a certain amount of illicit trade with other nations like France and (especially) Spain.

But the British policy, under mercantilism, was to keep the colonies as a market for manufactured goods while trying to drain them of gold and silver. It should not come as a surprise that this left the colonies short of specie relative to Britain proper, leading to deflation in the colonial economy so long as only specie-based currency was legal. The colonial governments repeatedly tried to get round this by printing paper money... which the British generally did not encourage.
Mercantilism worked so good elsewhere that they built a global empire around the concept (and the spanish/french/dutch/etc). I fail to see the relevance of repeating how it works.
All of the famous eastindia companies worked on the same principle.
Yes, and the East India Companies were bad for the economies of the remote colonial areas they controlled. The Dutch and British East India Companies were engines for transferring wealth from the "Indies" to the Netherlands and to Britain, respectively.

Mercantilism can be great for the homeland. It is not so great for the colonies, as it deliberately seeks to impoverish the colonies and subordinate their economies to that of the homeland in the name of enriching the homeland.

Therefore, mercantilist British policies may be highly relevant in a discussion of how economic issues affected the decision of the American colonies to revolt against Britain.
Simon_Jester wrote:1-Gold and silver flowed steadily out of North America to pay taxes to Britain.
2-Gold and silver could not flow into North America from non-British merchants because of the Navigation Acts.
3-Gold and silver flowed into north America from British merchants only slowly, which was a feature, not a bug, of the mercantilist policies of the time.
4-There were no sources of gold and silver in the colonies.
IIRC
1-A "lies-to children" in that it didn't deplete local specie. It just prevented its growth.
2-A half-truth where it should have but didn't because smuggling was so prevalent. Lots of the specie in the colonies (just like the rest of the world) was pieces of eight.
3-Agreed, but it was not deemed as a bad thing at the time. The setting of the prices from London was on the other hand seen as a bad thing at the time. So again a "lies-to-children" concept.
4-Agreed but again with a nitpick. There was 'not enough' sources of gold and silver in the colonies, and even if there were the colonies couldn't create legal specie that way since minting was only allowed in London (at the tower IIRC). for the brit emp to allow a colony to mint its own money would have been seen as insane at the time.
1) How is this not a problem that tends to subject the colonies to deflation and economic stagnation at best or decay at worst? Artificially skimming the top off the local money supply and shipping the money to another continent is bound to have consequences for the local economy.

2) Yes, but remember that at the same time the British were levying new taxes on the colonies, they were also cracking down on enforcement of the Navigation Acts. Thus, a route for non-British specie to find its way into the colonial economy was, if not closed, at least narrowed... at the same time that the British sought to extract larger quantities of specie from the colonies.

3) "This was not deemed as a bad thing at the time." What, because the American colonial leaders were supposed to be economic geniuses who would invent concepts like 'deflation' out of thin air? This was before Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations, for crying out loud. Economics was in its infancy.

Imagine you are a man on the ground in 1773, in an economy where mercantilist policies are causing deflation at the same time taxes are being increased and collected in specie. You will NOT think "Ah-ha, mercantilist policies cause deflation!" because the terms "mercantilist" and "deflation" do not yet exist. You will, however, notice that it takes a man more work to accumulate the same number of shillings- you see the practical consequence of deflation, if not the underlying cause. At the same time, you will notice that the colonial overlords are taking away more shillings than they used to, even while each shilling requires a growing amount of effort to obtain.

This is likely to strike you as excessive taxation. If your complaints to the central government are then repeatedly ignored, and the central government sends ham-handed officials backed by hostile soldiers to enforce the taxes you are complaining about... well, at that point, you are quite likely to rebel.

And the central government's policies still have a lot to do with the reason you rebelled, even if you didn't get around to writing a groundbreaking economic treatise on exactly why the central government's policies caused the economic crisis that led you to rebel.

Men do not need a sophisticated vocabulary with which to speak about food or money, in order to notice that they are hungry or poor. Nor do they need such a vocabulary to become angry when someone else takes away a growing share of their food or money, at a time when they feel hungry or poor.

4) Exactly my point. By banning the colonies from creating local currency (specie or paper), and by promoting policies that led to a flow of specie away from the colonies and into Britain itself, the British government could easily cause deflation.
Simon_Jester wrote:At this point, it's quite predictable that you'd see deflation in the colonies. The money supply shrank, which hit debtors hard. And that included both large numbers of small farmers on the frontier, and much of the colonial upper class.
Again I think this is flawed and backwards reasoning. The deflation in 1760s was because of the just finished war against french+natives, which had led to lots of paper money which then deflated vs printed worth. It was a reason for dissent yes, but not as you imply something which is 'predicted' by those points you give above.
I think you misunderstand. My point is that the combination of mercantilist policies and a lack of gold and silver mines and a lack of high-value export 'cash crop' commodities like sugar or furs leads to a predictable consequence: deflation of specie-backed currency.

This, in turn, predictably leads to economic crises, when we view the whole issue in terms of modern economics. At the time, the British could not reasonably have foreseen what would happen, or taken the appropriate steps to stop it from happening... but the fact that they continued to pursue essentially the same policies regardless of colonial complaints about the tax burden does not speak well of the degree to which the Parliament looking out for colonial interests.
Simon_Jester wrote:Broad policies were set by Parliament, which was hopelessly remote from the actual scene of events and had virtually no accurate information on conditions in the colonies.
Agreed that this was how it was felt in the 13 colonies. That was however not really accurate. It would be more accurate to say that the enlightened americans no longer understood the empire. (and rightly so) They were too far away from parliament to understand why those laws/measures were put in place. (Which representation would have solved ironicly enough).

Even when the americans agreed in principle with a specific tax they didn't agree with its formulation or stipulations. Or as in some of the shutting down of the paper money schemes in the colonies it was because similar schemes in other parts of the world had bombed and led to disasters. Something which the americans didn't care about because they of course only saw to their situation.
The reverse was equally true- Parliament didn't know the details of what was going on in the American colonies, and so enacted laws that the colonials themselves would see as absurd... because they were based on mistaken assumptions about the colonies.

Any government which tries to write laws governing the economy of a place it has never visited is going to do this sort of thing from time to time. Knowledgeable people in the provinces will look at the law and go "what the hell are they thinking, this will ruin us!" And sometimes they will be right; it will ruin them, and the fact of the matter is that the central government simply didn't know it was happening.

For example, the colonies had huge amounts of unclaimed land that could be used as securities to back currency. It made considerable sense for colonial governments to print paper money backed by land as a way of increasing the (slim) money supply allowed to them under mercantilist policy, so that internal colonial trade could proceed unimpeded.

In England, similar policies would have been silly: the local government of, say, Norfolk would be out of their minds to print paper money backed by land, because they didn't have all that much land of their own in the first place after you subtracted out the private property.

Economic policy must be tailored to local conditions, by nature. When knowledge of local conditions and the power to regulate the economy are separated (as with the American colonies, so long as they were not allowed to elect MPs), you get economic crises caused by breakdowns of management.
Spoonist wrote:@simon Jester
Regarding the Minutemen, you should argue your case against Samuel Adams, Charles Lee and George Washington all who argue against what you say. Pick their arguments apart first and then come back to us.
Were they arguing "disband the militia, they're useless?" Or were they arguing "we can't take the militia into a standup fight against British regulars?"

Do you see the difference between those two positions? A lot of armies, throughout history, have been tough and well enough equipped to easily defeat irregular forces in pitched battles. This does not mean the irregulars were unable to affect the war. There is more to a war than who has the largest force of 'heavies' to fight pitched battles in the open field.
But more importantly the whole concept is bogus in context. The war was won by the support of the French. Without them no victory is possible.
Are you aware that multiple factors can contribute to the same war? That, for example, the British might have lost the colonial revolts in the Americas because of French support for the rebels and the long supply line that made reinforcing the colonies difficult and the fact that the local population was at best unsympathetic and at worst actively mustering hundreds or thousands of armed men to shoot at them?

Do these other factors just disappear because the war would not have ended in a colonial victory had it not been for the existence of a European-trained Continental Army to take out the large, concentrated British forces in pitched battles?
Its ignorant on a huge scale to claim that the minutemen or any such lightly armed militia could have played any significant role vs the british empire.
Does this observation generalize to other lightly armed irregular or partisan units? Does a 20th century resistance movement become irrelevant until it can field its own armored divisions, with it being "ignorant on a huge scale" to claim that "such lightly armed militia" could have played "any significant role vs the [german/soviet/american] empire?"

Do irregulars become irrelevant because they don't defeat large, organized armies with good training and plenty of heavy weapons all by themselves?
Which is the important lesson regarding this stupid meme.
What stupid meme? Who are you arguing against here? What, exactly, do you think my position on this subject is?
Thanas wrote:The minuteman were laughable. History shows time and time again what happens when a widely popular rebellion tries to go up against professional forces without having any professional forces themselves. They get crushed. See France etc. Even the best "minuteman" in history, the Spanish guerilla, only managed to bleed, but not defeat Napoleon.
Given that a lot of other professional armies were crushed by Napoleon, "failed to defeat Napoleon" is not a strong enough criticism of a fighting force to justify saying it was "useless" or "laughable."

Or was the Prussian Army Napoleon beat at Jena 'laughable?'

Sneers aside, the militia's persistent failure to beat British regulars in a stand-up battle does not make them irrelevant to the war. The battles of Lexington and Concord illustrate this: British column marches out of Boston, brushes aside the rapid-reaction 'Minutemen' unit with little effort at Lexington, then runs into serious opposition at Concord. One of their units notably loses an open-field battle against the militia due to poor deployment and greatly inferior numbers. The regulars, worried about being cut off from Boston by increasing numbers of militiamen and mobbed, fall back. Their line of march was harassed by ambushing militia units operating in platoon or company strength, or as loose skirmisher units, against the column.

The regulars here accomplished at least part of what they set out to do: destroy militia armories. But they accomplished it at a disproportionately high cost, and in a way which undermined their ability to control the population. The whole thing would have been far, far easier had they not had to worry about the militia- indeed, the mission they were dispatched to perform would never have been necessary in the first place.

Of course, a European-style regular army of equal numbers to the militia the Americans fielded would have demolished the column entirely, and in a single pitched battle between all the militia and the entire regular column, the regulars might well have won. The fact that the column wound up getting a bloody nose for their trouble remains.

It is also worth noting that subsequently, the city of Boston was surrounded by an army of over ten thousand militia who had rallied around the city in response to the British offensive. This siege continued throughout 1775 and into 1776, as the militia were reinforced by the first Continental Army units and by artillery captured from Fort Ticonderoga by militia. Ultimately, the British withdrew, never successfully breaking the siege. Not even at Breed's Hill where, as you describe, they carried the rebel positions at the bayonet after the militia ran out of ammunition, despite numerous tactical blunders on the regulars' part.

I would not rate the militia as 'irrelevant' to the progress of the Boston campaign.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-03-01 05:11am
by Spoonist
@Simon Jester
I wouldn't call what we got so far a debate. Its more of an argument. So I don't think you need to involve the old proff. Its not that I think that your proff is a loon or similar. Its that I think that he basis his analyzis on old data, data which has been interpreted by a pedagogic view of simplyfiyng stuff, thus reducing them to "lies-to-children".
From your reaction I don't think that you get what Pratchett means with a "lies-to-children". Its not necessarily a negative thing, its more a simplification to be able to convey truly complex datastreams into easy to digest/remember concepts. Feodalism comes to mind. Its a contextual model for something which is too complex to understand, but unless one recognizes that it is a model it is easy to believe that reality worked like the conceptual model instead of how it really was.

If you don't mind I'll respond over several posts due to time constraints.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-03-01 09:21am
by Simon_Jester
Spoonist wrote:@Simon Jester
I wouldn't call what we got so far a debate. Its more of an argument. So I don't think you need to involve the old proff. Its not that I think that your proff is a loon or similar. Its that I think that he basis his analyzis on old data, data which has been interpreted by a pedagogic view of simplyfiyng stuff, thus reducing them to "lies-to-children".

From your reaction I don't think that you get what Pratchett means with a "lies-to-children"...
Actually, I do. I am intimately familiar with them because in physics you have to go through multiple layers of the things in the process of your education. But there comes a point at which the practice of telling lies-to-children has to come to an end; you can't keep telling people technically untrue simplifications so that you'll be able to teach them more details later indefinitely. Eventually you come to later and have to get into the details.

Please remember that this wasn't a high school course I'm talking about; this was a university history course at the senior level. The bulk of the students were history majors, and I can only assume a fair number of them were planning to continue to the graduate level in history in the near future.

I would expect, in the sense that I would be disappointed if I didn't get, a substantially accurate picture of what the professor believes to be true from such a course. In physics, they generally stop feeding you oversimplifications around the second or third year of college; how long does it take them to stop in history?

Also remember that not all things "simplified for pedagogy" are in fact untrue. For example, I can take Maxwell's Laws, simplify them for pedagogy (say, because I'm teaching students who can't do vector calculus and still think of vectors as magnitude-direction)... and they're still true. Gauss's Law is not made less valid because of my choice to present it to the students in terms of the Gaussian pillbox, rather than as "del dot vector-E equals rho over epsilon" when the students don't know what "del dot" means. There are better ways to use Gauss's Law, some of which are more generalizable and "powerful" in that you can do more with them. But they don't supersede the hoary old 'pillbox' method at all; they just work in more places, and become a tool in the physicist's arsenal in addition to the pillbox.

Again, there does have to be a limit where you stop 'lying-to-children,' simply because the children are grown up now and if you don't tell them the real facts, or a significant portion of them, you're never going to get the chance. I would be very surprised to learn that Dr. Bouton was not teaching with this in mind, since (I repeat) this was not a freshman-level history course or the like. In other subjects, he want fairly far into depth about some of the less pleasant details of the Revolution and made a point of addressing the popular mythology on the topic. I would expect no less of him on the issue of the colonial economy.

He might simply have been wrong, but I don't think he was presenting a technically inaccurate summary of what he knew knowing that he could fill in the important details he'd left out later on.

On a side note, Spoonist, could you remind me again what makes you think this whole idea must be some exploded theory that's only taught now because it's simple enough to hand to undergraduates? I mean, didn't you throw in a disclaimer saying that you personally are not an expert on the history of the American Revolution?

The fact that you can find someone who disagrees with a theory does not mean the theory is wrong to the extent of being taught only as a useful lie-to-children before one gets round to teaching the real (more complicated) facts.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-03-01 09:55am
by The Asiduo
The article is just hilarious. But, sadly, it's not some isolated piece of propaganda: right-wing "think-tanks" in USA are actively rewriting history to show their point of "socialism is bad, capitalism and free markets are the supreme good". For example, I read one article from the Cato Institute about the fall of the Roman Empire, and the point of the article was that "Rome fell because it was a socialist state". WTF?. Rome, the quintessential commercial imperialist state, a socialist state?.

These guys are out of their minds.

Re: Why America hates Communism

Posted: 2011-03-01 10:07am
by bz249
Simon_Jester wrote: Do these other factors just disappear because the war would not have ended in a colonial victory had it not been for the existence of a European-trained Continental Army to take out the large, concentrated British forces in pitched battles?
Its ignorant on a huge scale to claim that the minutemen or any such lightly armed militia could have played any significant role vs the british empire.
Does this observation generalize to other lightly armed irregular or partisan units? Does a 20th century resistance movement become irrelevant until it can field its own armored divisions, with it being "ignorant on a huge scale" to claim that "such lightly armed militia" could have played "any significant role vs the [german/soviet/american] empire?"

Do irregulars become irrelevant because they don't defeat large, organized armies with good training and plenty of heavy weapons all by themselves?
Which is the important lesson regarding this stupid meme.
What stupid meme? Who are you arguing against here? What, exactly, do you think my position on this subject is?
Thanas wrote:The minuteman were laughable. History shows time and time again what happens when a widely popular rebellion tries to go up against professional forces without having any professional forces themselves. They get crushed. See France etc. Even the best "minuteman" in history, the Spanish guerilla, only managed to bleed, but not defeat Napoleon.
Given that a lot of other professional armies were crushed by Napoleon, "failed to defeat Napoleon" is not a strong enough criticism of a fighting force to justify saying it was "useless" or "laughable."

Or was the Prussian Army Napoleon beat at Jena 'laughable?'

Sneers aside, the militia's persistent failure to beat British regulars in a stand-up battle does not make them irrelevant to the war. The battles of Lexington and Concord illustrate this: British column marches out of Boston, brushes aside the rapid-reaction 'Minutemen' unit with little effort at Lexington, then runs into serious opposition at Concord. One of their units notably loses an open-field battle against the militia due to poor deployment and greatly inferior numbers. The regulars, worried about being cut off from Boston by increasing numbers of militiamen and mobbed, fall back. Their line of march was harassed by ambushing militia units operating in platoon or company strength, or as loose skirmisher units, against the column.

The regulars here accomplished at least part of what they set out to do: destroy militia armories. But they accomplished it at a disproportionately high cost, and in a way which undermined their ability to control the population. The whole thing would have been far, far easier had they not had to worry about the militia- indeed, the mission they were dispatched to perform would never have been necessary in the first place.

Of course, a European-style regular army of equal numbers to the militia the Americans fielded would have demolished the column entirely, and in a single pitched battle between all the militia and the entire regular column, the regulars might well have won. The fact that the column wound up getting a bloody nose for their trouble remains.

It is also worth noting that subsequently, the city of Boston was surrounded by an army of over ten thousand militia who had rallied around the city in response to the British offensive. This siege continued throughout 1775 and into 1776, as the militia were reinforced by the first Continental Army units and by artillery captured from Fort Ticonderoga by militia. Ultimately, the British withdrew, never successfully breaking the siege. Not even at Breed's Hill where, as you describe, they carried the rebel positions at the bayonet after the militia ran out of ammunition, despite numerous tactical blunders on the regulars' part.

I would not rate the militia as 'irrelevant' to the progress of the Boston campaign.
Sorry, but the American War of Independence was a global war in which the British found themselves as the Big Bad Guy which was fighting against everyone else (the French, the Spanish and the Dutch teamed against them). Now this was exactly the situation which the British diplomacy meant to avoid, and they were usually able to do so because time after time there was a bully in the continent (first Spain, than France and at last Germany) which threatened the others with land invasion and the occupation of the home soil (like in 1673 when the Dutch decided that the recaptured New Amsterdam worth less than the original one, so they qucikly made peace with the Britons to concentrate on the French). But the American War of Independence was a huge failure on the diplomatic side and after the indecisive Battle of Chesapeake Bay the British realized that there is no way they can win this war and tried to consolidate the situation with minimazing the inevitable losses.

In that respect they did a great job, since they were able to keep their naval supremacy against the coalition (thus denying a land invasion against the British Islands), defend the strategically important fort of Gibraltar and with their gains in India they could pull a territory exchange with France for the lost Carribean bases. They ended the war with losing only the North American colonies, Florida and Menorca (to Spain) and Tobago and Senegal (to France).