The founding of our nation

I am a loyal, patriotic American. I love the USA, and strongly hope it continues to prosper.
That said it irritates me when American public schools sugar coat our own history.
For example we are taught that the United States of America was founded on liberty and justice for all. That we were founded on idealism.
Our founding fathers said "no taxation without representation."



My point: The United States of America was founded on f'ing tax evasion!

Since I haven't been to an American school I cannot fully estimate just by how much the nation's early history is distorted. Having instead went to school in a country with a remarkably dark recent history that could for that reason not be coloured into anything more pleasant to listen to I don't even know what a warped picture of history would look like.

However, as far as I came to understand, while tax evasion was one of the prime motivators of the revolution against and subsequent independence from the British Crown, I would not go as far as to say that it was a sole motivator. The taxation without representation, a most prominent symptom, was still just a symptom of a still larger problem, namely the maltreatment by Brittain and contemporary empires of their respective colonies abroad. So in this light, the USA can be seen as founded in opposition to the arguably tyrannical structures found at that time back in Europe, while of course the unfair taxation was but a prime indicator of those structures and the factor pushing most towards the eventual uprising. In a way, what I'm saying is, while the intent was likely very economical in nature indeed, the resulting action set a precedent that over the centuries came to change the world. Many credit the French Revolution of 1789 as the defining point of subsequent Western history, but I'd argue that some of that spirit began back with 1776 and the short time gap doesn't seem like a coincidence to me either, given all the other superficial similarities of the two situations.

"Tax evasion" is a little too much of a simplification as Gisteron was saying. Tax evasion is when one does not pay all of the tax they are liable to pay so in this sense it is true. But there is a difference between how a rich oligarch (or multinational company) employs tax evasion - which is simply to keep more money - and tax evasion as part of a wider political movement aimed at undermining the establishment.

It may have been tax evasion, but it was many other things as well.

It wasn't neccessarily tax evasion in the sense that they just didn't want to pay the taxes. They didn't want to pay taxes while they did not have a say in how that money was used, hence the representation part.

I do agree that american schools sugar coat American history to an almost hysterical level. How many American schools actually talk about the Trail of Tears or the imprisonment camps for japanese-americans in WWII. Heck, they don't even teach about Columbus the right way and he gets a freakin' holiday. There are parts of American history that I'm not proud of, but I learned to accept that they happened, what makes me more upset is that I was lied to about it for the better part of two decades.

this is pretty quick in and of itself (less than 10 minutes)

https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/aspeninstitute/aspen-founding-docs/aspen-declaration-independence/v/background-and-introduction-to-the-united-states-declaration-of-independence

id like to add that the founding fathers did their very best within the framework of their own cultural conditioning to build a nation of equality opportunity and freedom and when we look at the deliberate wording of their literature it is clear that they did a pretty good job of it, all things considered