Good day, Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners.

As always, thank you so much for listening and thank you for your letters.

We've received quite a few in the past couple of weeks and I read each and every one of them

and appreciate them. A particular other guy who stood up for me after my

admonishing a couple of programs back. That was very nice. This week we talked to President

Jefferson about the period prior to the onset of the American Revolution.

With an attitude of, well, what was the British point of view? Should we take time to understand that?

The British view was, man, they're touchy. We win the World War for them, the French and

Indian War, which by the way, George Washington helped to touch off. Now we've done all this and

not for us, mostly for them, these Americans. All we want is for them to pay some small

amount of the national debt. We're going to tax some playing cards. We're going to

tax some newspapers. We'll tax some stamps, tax a little T. And every time we try to do some kind

of mild mannered revenue generation system, the Americans flare up and go nuts and write pamphlets

and broadsides and march in the streets and burn George III and effigy. You know, what's wrong

with these Americans? Don't they get it that they need to pay their fair share? These are not

onerous taxes. This is just sort of what you do when you've just won a very important World War,

which by the way, opened up the entire Ohio Valley for these Americans. So why can't they just

get on board with a rational tax system? So that's essentially how the British people saw it.

We talk about this in the show, but when you read about the level of taxation in Britain during

that time, 25% tax on things like soap and they were the highest tax citizens in all of Europe

is my understanding. And the ratio of taxes paid between Americans and Britain's were 50 times

greater in Britain. So it's kind of like, hey, pay your fair share. We're still this people.

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