Retarded Loyalists being? We wound up paying more taxes to our own government after independence than the we did to London.
Taxation WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. You forgot to mention that last bit, since we were quite fine with the way things were working pre-1750, even despite things like the colonists being used as cannon fodder during the French and Indian Wars, because the dumbasses in the British Parliament decided to escalate what would have been a localized frontier skirmish to take a fort or two, which had been happening on and off for the last few years, into a full-blown war with the French due to hawkish cabinet members who hated the Prime Minister at the time, intinatally leaking it and making such a move publically known for all to see. Basically, guaranteeing that the war would escalate into an almost decade-long conflict as the French, of course, heard about it and started sending troops in preparation. Even after providing he bulk of troops with about 12,000-ish provincial troops dying in poorly planned expeditions into said French land in a war that should have, for all intents and purposes, been a small, brief spat around the Ohio. And then were given the "Thank You" of being saddled with the debt and barred from those western lands that had been fought over in favor of native tribes who did as much raiding into 'friendly' colonial territory during and after the conflict as they did actual fighting against the Frenchies and their own native allies, who were also now getting protection from the Crown when all was said and done. They were all STILL 'fine' with the way things were run.
No, what really set off the colonists to finally revolt and tell the Islanders to fuck off from our internal affairs was the Currency Act of 1764, which severely restricted the colonies' right to issue their own money and forbade its legal tender status for the payment of private and public debts. Before this bill, the colonies had their own currency called colonial script or bills of credit, which allowed for all that rapid prosperity since it wasn't tied to the main British economic system and let the 13 colonies manage things in an inflation-free environment with minimal taxes, all according to their own needs. Pennsylvania is the model example of this, as its own pre-independence currency was able to stand against gold from 1723 till the Revolution. However, once this went into effect, it crashed and crippled the economies of the 13 colonies, since, owing to the fact that gold and silver currency were already scarce in colonial America, it meant an instant depression of the local economies of a largely agrarian people at that time who did much of their business with said colonial scripts. Now they were shit out of luck, and this only made those aforementioned debts to England an even more crippling force since now the main way to pay it all off had been made null and void. It gave full leverage to England-based traders and other economic institutions on the Isles, who were backed up with a Parliament that kept issuing new tax acts to make up for the losses of a war they precipitated into a full-blown conflict without understanding at all why people were getting more and more infuriated.
Stuff like the Sugar and Stamp Act or Townshend Acts, where just the last in a long line of ill-thought-out tax decrees that continually gave colonists the shaft despite constant warnings from people like Benjamin Franklin, who was the colonial agent in London, to knock it the fuck off or allow the colonies to reissue their own currency to get a handle on their own economies before things reached past the breaking point. The plain disconnect and lack of understanding from a Parliament so far away from America, who for some reason found it hard to wrap their heads around the idea that the colonists couldn't simply conjure up thousands of pounds from their ass to pay off everything, is what led to people thinking that it would be far better off for everyone to have things fully run by their own people at home. Which is what they had already been practically doing since first settlement. But you know, despite it all and even after the 'Intolerable' acts, where Parliament demonstrated their arrogance by doing things like closing off the Boston Harbor and taking direct control of Massachusetts' local government in one big "fuck you" cause they had a chimp out over some crates of tea from the East India Company being thrown in the ocean by angry colonists who didn't like some proto-company entity that had a lobby on Parliment from being given a total monopoly over the entire tea trade. There were still many overtures given to de-escalate the situation or have some sort of compromise where England would back off, and in turn have the region that made 1/3 of your merenacht navy, gave you all your tobacco and cotton, and fought that war you forced us into not that long ago, from going into an actual rebellion, then demanding independence.
All they had to do during those twenty or so years was give a smidge of representation in Parliament, even a token seat that held no real power, and it would have likely undercut or postponed the desires of independence to the latter half of the century. It really was that easy to just ease off the gas for just a few years and not have things boil over. Even a simple 'we will see' or 'I hear you' by the King would have also dulled the idea of a full-on independent republic, since all the ire was directed at Parliament rather than the crown before 1775. But again, all the English players Island-side just showed their lack of flexibility or shrewd diplomacy by acting more out of perceived slights than out of any sense of long-term pragmatism. Of course, the 13 colonies forming into their own united nation was gonna come with taxation. That is a given and was always gonna happen, since win or lose, colonists were gonna pay taxes. Just that now, the threat of having a bunch of dumbasses from a far-off island to just rug pull everyone was no longer there. Great Britain had never cared more than the bare minimum for North America; it was tertiary to the more immediately profitable Indian and Caribbean holdings. Why would you stay in that one-sided relationship after having been almost maliciously neglected by Parliament that didn't give two shits over the state of the colonies and never would?
If the Loyalists had gotten their wish, then we would have been economically stagnant for another half a century until we could scrounge ourselves up from the rut of the French and Indian Wars, since they weren't gonna help us with our economic woes. Why would they? Who gave a shit if some place like Virginia or Boston had decent living standards? So long as they proved the exports that were needed, that was all that was needed. It took Canada until the late 1860s to get an industry or any dedicated development that wasn't solely meant to be siphoned off to England. And that was after it had finally stopped being meek and spoke up about how it needed to run its own internal affairs, since ironically enough, it was pissed at Britain over the end of preferential 'colonial' market treatment during the 1840s and 1850s which hurt it's economy a lot, as they were tossed away in favor of a policy of complete free trade. Those two rebellions you listed that happened after the Revolution, while giving one a bit to ponder over the tenacious relationship between personal freedom and governmental powers. All ended with little bloodshed and resulted in the federal or state governments actually correctly responding to the grievances of the people. With Shay and his rebellion, it resulted in the faulty Articles of Confederation being reworked into the proper Constitution of the United States that we all know today, and with the newly elected Governor of Massachusetts placing a moratorium on debts and cutting taxes not even a year later due to the mini-revolt. Only 2 of the 'rebels' were executed, with everyone else gaining pardons since their intentions were in the right place.
The same thing happened with the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington personally rode out to put it down before things got too out of hand, and once more, things went the same way. The 'rebels' were made to surrender, and everyone was pardoned. Since the leaders who ran things post-revolution understood why they were upset and didn't immediately go far beyond what was strictly needed in terms of 'retaliation' or a 'response'. That whiskey tax, which was made really as a 'sin tax' and was consciously done to be the least 'objectionable' tax the government could levy since it was technically a 'luxury', would then be thusly repealed in 1802. Something that wouldn't have happened at all if we were still under British rule. Those rebellions would have been brutally crushed, everyone killed to set an example, and then everyone told to suck it up. I know you're talking from a modern point of view as someone living in modern America, and yeah, the level of taxes we pay today would have made someone in 1776 absolutely livid, but when you see our Cousins across the pond still paying taxes and having such a draconian level of hellish bureaucracy busywork that lets them nickle and dime any and everything, having done so for decades at this point. It makes me so very glad we chose the path of Independence. And, thankfully, doing so in a way that avoided us becoming like the French Revolution.
