For perspective, there are two ways we pay taxes currently: direct taxation via tax collection and indirect taxation via the inflation of the currency supply (govt prints money and uses it, your money becomes worth less about 2-3% year in good years). That second tax is optional, there are ways to not use your national currency and therefore not pay the inflationary tax. That second tax is also insidious because people don’t realize it’s happening. If you have to raise actual taxes, suddenly you get revolts and removed from power. Which is why most wars are funded with inflationary spending, not tax increases. People will gladly pay extra tax for popular wars, but not unpopular ones.
Imagine how the world might look different if inflationary spending wasn’t a particularly powerful taxation tool because not much value was wrapped up in national currencies. Imagine if going to war meant raising actual taxes. Might we have a world where there is less war because war is now harder to fund?
Why is the Union flag upside down?
and the 7 years war was fought without consent from the colonies. The colonies did not want to fight the french, their allies.
The colonies, including a colonist named George Washington (a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army) started the 7 year war by ambushing a group of French soldiers building a fort on French territory in the Ohio river valley. I don’t know where you get the idea that the British colonists were allies with the French. But, if that was the case, the French must have found that a pretty confusing thing for their allies to do.
I had heard that they were actually lowering taxes and tariffs on imported goods and since the founding fathers were all involved in smuggling goods in — the lower taxes threatened their personal income so they rebelled
It’s complicated. They removed all taxation that would have benefitted the the colonies, but kept the Townshend Act taxes in place.
The colonies had been evading the Townshend taxes, largely because they were understood to be punitive. That’s the primary reason tea had been smuggled from The Netherlands, as resistance to what was viewed as unjust taxation.
