(07-11-2019, 03:50 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(07-11-2019, 03:04 PM)Caldrac Wrote: Is "All taxation is theft" a really stupid mantra though? One of the primary reasons the Revolutionary War started was because King George III was essentially making the currency exchange between the thirteen colonies that they had established among themselves illegal and attempting to force them into using British currency, or, at least attempting to benefit off of it and therefore tax the piss out of them. Thus the phrase "No taxation without representation" was born. 

The reality today for many hard working citizens of the United States is that we're essentially working roughly three - four months a year to see apart of our annual income taken by the Government (In reality, the Federal Reserve) and trusting them to do the right thing(s) with it. Which seldom they ever do. Regardless of who is running the Country in office or whose political party has the most pull with Congress. 

For sure, a body of Government needs to be in place. It can work. And it should work. The Greeks are credited for starting it first with Democracy, etc. But even most people are skeptical today. And for good reason. When you continue to see Lobbyists sticking their fingers in everything they possibly can politically or just good old fashioned Plutocracy at work. It's hard to buy into the system. 

We're just now starting to see some honesty in the mainstream in this regard. I'll never forget when Donald Trump during his debate started pointing out each and every single one of his fellow candidates standing up there on stage with him for previously giving them out money over the years. Because that's been going on forever in this Country. 

Hopefully that trend continues.

Lemme help you fish the rest of that elementary school memory out of your brain...
King George
George Washington
1773 Boston Tea Party, tax on tea...
Americans said, "No taxation...

... WITHOUT REPRESENTATION"

Ah.
Now we remember.

Here's some more information for you listed below. It's a little bit more extensive than your Elementary School education. I know it's hard for some of you to actually pick-up a book or find other sources of reading material once you've received your High School Diploma or GED in life but there's a lot more information to be learned and obtained post basic education in this Country. 

The idea that it was just a [BLEEP] tax break for the British on tea importation in this Country that sparked the Revolution is hilarious. It's always a lot more complicated than that. Certainly a lot more complicated than what they're willing to teach you in the public school system.

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When he arrived, he was surprised to find rampant unemployment and poverty among the British working classes… Franklin was then asked how the American colonies managed to collect enough money to support their poor houses. He reportedly replied:

“We have no poor houses in the Colonies; and if we had some, there would be nobody to put in them, since there is, in the Colonies, not a single unemployed person, neither beggars nor tramps.”
In 1764, the Bank of England used its influence on Parliament to get a Currency Act passed that made it illegal for any of the colonies to print their own money. The colonists were forced to pay all future taxes to Britain in silver or gold. Anyone lacking in those precious metals had to borrow them at interest from the banks.
Only a year later, Franklin said, the streets of the colonies were filled with unemployed beggars, just as they were in England. The money supply had suddenly been reduced by half, leaving insufficient funds to pay for the goods and services these workers could have provided. He maintained that it was “the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament which has caused in the colonies hatred of the English and . . . the Revolutionary War.” This, he said, was the real reason for the Revolution: “the colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction.”


[font=Georgia,]Franklin also reportedly said:
[/font]

Quote:The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the Revolution.

Alexander Hamilton echoed similar sentiments:

Quote:Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first treasury secretary, said that paper moneyhad composed three-fourths of the total money supply before the American Revolution. When the colonists could not issue their own currency, the money supply had suddenly shrunk, leaving widespread unemployment, hunger and poverty in its wake. Unlike the Great Depression of the 1930s, people in the 1770s were keenly aware of who was responsible for their distress.

As historian Alexander Del Mar wrote in 1895:

Quote:[T]he creation and circulation of bills of credit by revolutionary assemblies…coming as they did upon the heels of the strenuous efforts made by the Crown to suppress paper money in America [were] acts of defiance so contemptuous and insulting to the Crown that forgiveness was thereafter impossible . . . [T]here was but one course for the crown to pursue and that was to suppress and punish these acts of rebellion…Thus the Bills of Credit of this era, which ignorance and prejudice have attempted to belittle into the mere instruments of a reckless financial policy were really the standards of the Revolution. they were more than this: they were the Revolution itself!

And British historian John Twells said the same thing:

Quote:The British Parliament took away from America its representative money, forbade any further issue of bills of credit, these bills ceasing to be legal tender, and ordered that all taxes should be paid in coins … Ruin took place in these once flourishing Colonies . . . discontent became desperation, and reached a point . . . when human nature rises up and asserts itself.

In fact, the Americans ignored the British ban on American currency, and:

Quote:“Succeeded in financing a war against a major power, with virtually no ‘hard’ currency of their own, without taxing the people.”

[font=Georgia,]Indeed, the first act of the New Continental Congress[/font]

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