Originally posted on 10/24/2017:

I'm getting a little off topic here but do you know the real reason why there was a revolution in this country about 250 years ago? It had very little to do with taxes which is what you are taught when you go through school. It was because the King of England made it illegal for the colonists at the time to continue to use their own currency.

Not long after passage of the Sugar Act, Parliament enacted another new law—a law which would plunge the colonies into financial depression. Businesses had been expanding quickly in the colonies. Small fortunes were already being made as the colonists begin to develop the bountiful eastern half of North America. Shipbuilding was already a big industry. Colonial shipyards were building one-third of all the merchant vessels sailing under the British flag.
To make business easier to pursue, the colonies created their own paper money. It was called colonial scrip. It was money issued by colonial governments for the benefit of the people in general. British bankers didn’t like this. With the colonies printing their own money, America’s economy appeared to be getting out of the control of Britain.
To prevent this, the British Parliament passed the Currency Act of 1764. This made colonial scrip illegal and forced the colonists to exchange it for British money, issued by the Bank of England. To make matters worse, the British only gave the colonists one Bank of England note for every two notes of colonial scrip. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “the circulating medium of exchange was thus reduced by half.”
Suddenly, all-American products for half price! The Americans had to pay twice the price for all the British products they bought. Cutting the money supply to the colonies in half caused tremendous financial problems. Concerning the Act, Franklin wrote:
“In one year the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an extent on the streets of the Colonies were filled with the unemployed.”
In fact, Franklin believed that the anger caused by this depression was one of the major factors for the Revolutionary War.
Again, they don't teach this to you in school, and I think it's pretty obvious why they don't