[lentulusgracchus]

The war with the King was over far far less taxation than we are slaves to now.

That's a point often misunderstood. It wasn't the rate of the tax. It was the fact that America was being set up to follow Ireland, not England, in the parliamentary tax regime, which was rapacious and confiscatory in Ireland.

Without representation in Parliament, we were set up to become the next Ireland, our productivity having already surpassed England's and teased up the institutional avarice of Parliament's "appropriators".

[nathanbedford]

And of course the signal injustice visited upon the Irish was the fact that they were virtually defenseless, having no real representation in Parliament at that time and being governed by the Anglican ascendancy. Besides, Parliament was a corrupt body with many "rotten boroughs."

I say again, the essence was not to avoid tax altogether but to protect oneself by getting representation. The colonials knew that they were bound to be on the wrong end of the mercantile system unless they themselves could regulate it and that requires representation or autonomy.