It really shouldn’t be news to any of you that today, being the 4th of July, is Independence Day in the United States of America. If it is news to you I would love to know how you have so far managed to avoid the constant battering ram of patriotism that comes from that direction of the globe.
Anyway as I’m not American I am not blinded by the in built patriotism and can look at this logically. Google says there were four driving factors that sparked the American Revolution.
- Taxation
- The Boston Tea Party
- Intolerable Acts
- The Battle of Concord
And I’ll be honest my knowledge of American history is pretty crap, this is probably going to shock some Americans but… we don’t care about your history in Europe, we literally have furniture older than your country.
Of course I know about your little tea party. I honestly wonder whether you were super angry and prepared to commit the most drastic act you could against a British person, or whether you didn’t realise quite what you were doing. British people are still bitter about you wasting some perfectly good tea, to this day.
And I know a little bit about the taxation problem, enough to know what research I needed to do to make it seem like a silly reason…
In 1733 the British parliament decided to place a tax of 6 pence per gallon on Molasses, mostly because the plantation owners in the British West Indies wanted them to, at least that’s what google said. Then after some expensive wars and fighting with the French the British needed to recoup some of their war time losses, war is expensive (but the Americans should know that as they have been at war for 224 years out of their 241 years of existence…)
The British came up with a plan to make money in the colonies they had just spent ages fighting the French for. Reduce the tax on molasses but enforce it with more gusto. The previous 6 pence per gallon tax hadn’t been collected with any great efficiency, so they halved the tax rate and put more effort into collecting it this time. This didn’t sit well with colonists that until now had been doing what big American businesses are great at, dodging taxes.
The irony is that had the Americans not gained their independence their sugar tax would be lower today than it is… The American government uses what seem like some pretty dodgy policies to control the price of sugar within the states. This means that if you want to buy sugar you should not do it in the US.
So the British wanted to half the tax on sugar but actually collect it and the Americans rebelled. Now the Americans charge twice as much for sugar than the rest of the world and they just accept it? You guys are crazy.
It’s actually thought that the Americans do this with a lot of their products but it’s hard to tell because the prices and what not aren’t released in the same way that they are for sugar.
I’m not saying you guys should be pleading with the Brits to take you back, because it seems like British politics is a bit of a mess right now. But maybe you need to spend a bit more time thinking before acting… you’ve had a lot of war and made a lot of enemies, even your friends are more like frenemies… That and your independence has lead to you electing President Donald J Trump, maybe you guys weren’t ready for your independence.
I mean I know I certainly wasn’t ready for my independence. I have to cook all my own meals these days and wash my own clothes. Independence kinda sucks.
S. Hansen
25,000 Light-years 