This article was originally published by Michael Matulef at The Mises Institute.  Every July 4th, Americans are handed sparklers and told to celebrate their freedom. Politicians climb podiums, flags wave, a hundred million dollars’ worth of fireworks scatter across the sky, and somewhere between the hot dogs and the stadium-rock anthems, it becomes easy to confuse the theater of freedom with the substance of it. Let’s be precise about what actually happened in 1776. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not, by any stretch, anarchists. Many owned slaves. Most had no intention of dissolving the institution of…

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