- cross-posted to:
- 2northamerican4you@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- 2northamerican4you@sh.itjust.works
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That’s a gross oversimplification of a very complex era of history.
The people weren’t represented when taxes were levied. Taxes were calculated based on what England needed to pay back its debts, not based on what the colonists could afford. The colonists were taxed more heavily than people in England, even though they didn’t ask to go over there. England asked them to colonize, as favor, knowing the Spanish and the French were already there and claiming territory. The war wasn’t a surprise, they basically sent them over knowing a war was very likely. Their reward for all of that was higher taxes with no representation in parliament. The colonists tried many rounds of negotiations and only resorted to revolution after England refused to budge at all on negotiations, stopped returning letters, and levied even higher taxes in repose to negotiation attempts.
(just wanted to say thanks for the informative post)
The British chose to tax the productive members of society instead of those who benefitted, in a nutshell. I’m not sure how much the landed gentry could afford, though; they seem to be constantly on the edge of bankruptcy due to a variety of factors not excluding their profligate spending.
Meanwhile today:
🇮🇱 We are occupying land and committing war crimes in the Middle East
🇺🇸 Um what
🇮🇱 And we are working undercover to brainwash you with propaganda so you can defend them
🇺🇸 That’s fucked up
🇮🇱 We need your taxes to support anything that we want to do
🇺🇸 We heavily disapprove of your government
🇮🇱 Then stop us
🇺🇸 Nah sounds like a lot of work and also we’re too compromised to have any power over you
🇺🇸 also I side with Russia now
Please stand by for 250 years of complaining about the wrong thing
The issue was “taxation without representation”. They were being taxed without the ability to negotiate.
Honestly there’s a lot wrong with America but we don’t need propaganda on how “Britain was right all along”.
But the British empire was extracting the wealth from the colonies as well. So it was actually in their best interest to protect the colonies or risk losing that income source.
They didn’t want to pay for an overpriced subscription service to “elite” soldiers who didn’t know the land or understand the style of warfare. Plus, they didn’t want to abide by treaties that would stop them from aggressively expanding and killing natives just because they couldn’t afford that subscription service. So they clicked “unsubscribe” but you know how hard it is to unsubscribe from these things.
The whole thing is very ironic though, because after Britain wracked up massive war debts fighting over a colonial border squabble and then lost all the colonies trying to pay those debts, France wracked up massive war debts supporting the colonists, with the aim of weakening the British, and trying to raise taxes to pay those debts is how the king got his head chopped off.
Also, the US today is $40 trillion in debt. If you look at the last 25 years or so and add up all the money spent on the military, waging expensive forever wars halfway around the globe, you get pretty close to that number. So the US has figured out how to wage war without paying for it through taxes and there will certainly be zero negative consequences to doing that indefinitely and borrowing more to pay war debts.
More people should learn how national debt actually works. People equate it to household debt or business debt too often.
I understand that it’s not. But I also understand that the government is currently paying a trillion dollars every year just on interest. And that countries are reconsidering the dollar as a stable reserve currency.
National debt isn’t the same thing as other kinds of debt but you can still only go “money printer go brrr” for so long before consequences start to show up.
Fun part is that France never financially recovered from this and then also had a revolution
