> This sounds needlessly circuitous. Money is fungible, so how is this different from saying the British overtaxing them? Because the British never spent their

> This sounds needlessly circuitous. Money is fungible, so how is this different from saying the British overtaxing them? Because the British never spent their own hard earned money. It isn't fungible when you take someone's money from one hand and return back a small amount with the other hand without doing any measurable amount of work to have earned the money in the first place. How hard is that to understand? As a counter, would you be okay with your Government taking a portion of your money as tax and using only a small portion of it for your benefit and keeping the rest to be distributed amongst the elected representatives? Obviously not. This has nothing to do with overtaxation because I am sure people wouldn't have resisted if that money was reused for common good. But it wasn't the case. The money was used to fill up British coffers to be used in fighting World Wars (for which by the way, Indian soldiers were forced to take part in with not much recognition). By the way, the Empire taxed everything. They did not even spare Salt! That should put some perspective.