(07-11-2019, 03:53 PM)Caldrac Wrote:

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



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]

OK.
Yes, there were monetary causes of the war.
There were many causes.
But the colonists did not demand zero taxation.
They did not argue that taxation was theft.
They demanded representation.
Which currencies would be acceptable for paying taxes was also in dispute. The colonists wanted their paper money to always be acceptable.
The British wanted taxes paid in gold and silver.
Then the British went further, saying the colonies could no longer even print their own money.

I agree that this last insult may have hurt the most.

But none of this proves any point about if taxation is theft.

What it does prove is that the colonists preferred fiat currency.  Too many right wingers today forget this.

Taxation isn't theft.
Money is created by governments.  Money can be made sound by gold, but social consensus within an economy that produces things that other countries want to buy is better than gold at this task.

Basic principles. Forget them, and you won't be able to make sense of the world.

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