Why have Americans always been so angry?

It's a familiar narrative, one we all learned as kids in school. Mother England began treating her colonists in North America as second-class citizens. King George III was a despotic tyrant. Parliament enacted laws as if to punish the colonies. 

Those seemingly punitive laws took the form of acts passed by Parliament to collect taxes. There was the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Townshend Acts (named for Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer) passed between 1767 and 1768. The Stamp Act of 1765 forced the colonists to pay a tax on paper items, including newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents, and even playing cards, inspiring the famous catch-phrase "taxation without representation" (the slogan survives on Washington, D.C. license plates.)

The bigger context reveals that England found itself in extreme debt from having fought the Seven Years' War against France and Spain, a truly global conflict known in the colonies as the French and Indian War. Monies raised went to supporting the British Army in North America, a force, no doubt, to advance England's imperial ambitions but one which also kept the colonists safe from the French, Spanish, and rival Native American nations.

And then there's the dreaded Tea Act of 1773, the most odious tax of all since it placed a tariff on imported tea. That's the one that led to the Boston Tea Party, where masked patriots—The Sons of Liberty—destroyed a shipment of tea by dumping the chests in Boston Harbor. 

Taxes on sugar and tea—the idea! Such draconian measures led Patrick Henry to roar: "Give me Liberty or give me Death!" Wonder what he would have yelled if the British had decided to make him work without pay on a tobacco plantation?

What went missing in our grammar school and high school American history classes was the inconvenient fact that the colonists enjoyed the highest standard of living per capita of any people on the planet—even better than their cousins back in England. The average annual income for colonial Americans in 1774 was £13.85, the highest in the western world.

The colonists found themselves on a continent of largely untapped resources which, as far as they were concerned, was theirs for the taking. And take them they did. They declared the preposterously named New World theirs by unilateral fiat despite very real claims of ownership by native nations who'd been living on the continent for thousands of years. The colonists laid claim to endless forests of old-growth timber; water power for mills via rivers and streams; and fish and game to feed an army or pay for one (the pelts of beavers, an animal plentiful in North America, were practically worth their weight in gold—just ask John Jacob Astor.)

And as for the labor required to exploit this bounty of resources, the colonists even enjoyed unfair advantages there: free labor forced from slaves, a shackled work force which grew into a veritable nation within a nation: by 1860, one of every seven Americans was the property of another American—four million men, women, and children.

When Gandhi led his famous Salt March over 150 years later against the same empire, he took the British to task for taxing not a luxury but a nutritional staple. The Salt Act of 1882 prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt. Gandhi wasn't trying only to repeal an unjust tax, he wanted the British to leave the Indian sub-continent, but it's telling which taxed item he chose to protest.

The colonists were a bunch of greedy merchants and spoiled consumers. They had more material wealth and comfort per person than any other human beings on earth but that wasn't enough for them. They were actually willing to risk their lives for the promise of more money. Were they being oppressed? Hardly. Were they being forced into unpaid labor, indentured servitude, or slavery? Not at all: the colonists were the slaveholders.

And it wasn't freedom of speech or freedom of the press or the right to worship or not worship the god or gods of their choice that compelled them to pick up muskets. It was money, plain and ugly. As the poet William Butler Yeats savagely characterized such an outlook, the colonists yearned for the chance to "fumble in a greasy till // And add the halfpence to the pence."

There have always been two narratives of American history: the one we tell ourselves, generation after generation, which concerns lofty ideals, high-minded heroics, inalienable rights, and precious freedoms, and the real story which has always been about dollars and cents, profits and tax-dodges.

It's hard to understand, but Americans have been angry right from the start and their gripe has always been about money. Nothing has changed.