Economics professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel says that a strong case can be made “that without the American Revolution, the condition of Native Americans would have been no better, the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies would have been significantly delayed, and the condition of European colonists throughout the British empire, not just those in what became the United States, would have been worse than otherwise.” He discusses the case at length in that article at the Library of Economics and Liberty.
The Revolution was a good idea for those roughly 1/3 of the Colonists who wished to separate themselves from the King and secede from British authority, which they sort of did do. But the new American founders’ forming of an entire nation, a political unit that all the inhabitants of the colonies would have to be a part of whether they liked it or not, and to be ruled over by a centralized regime in “Washington,” was not a good idea. Political centralization is never a good idea. The new U.S. Constitution empowered the centralized regime over the masses, created a Bureau of Elites with monopoly power, and it should have been foreseen that the Bill of Rights at some point would be ignored by the regime and all its apparatchiks (like ICE, which isn’t even authorized by the Constitution).
So in my view, I think the post-Revolution new political Union, at the expense of private property and self-rule, was really the beginning of the tearing down of the Enlightenment and the principles and values it attempted to promote. Revolution good, Union bad.
Scott Lazarowitz's Blog 