Federal taxation...a travesty from the start

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An excellent article on what might be termed the 18th century version of the Waco Massacre, euphamistically called the Whiskey Rebellion. It was neither a rebellion, nor about whiskey.
Libertarians, Socialists, and the Whiskey Rebellion

Still, the rebellion and its suppression were not ultimately about booze. They were about the nature and purpose of federal taxation, about government involvement in finance and monetary policy, and about the relationship between democratic republicanism and markets. (Hence their longstanding interest for libertarians.) The "whiskey rebels" had a nuanced grasp of such issues. So did Alexander Hamilton. Modern historians of the founding and federal eras, however, as well as many biographers of Hamilton and Washington, tend not to. In large part they've treated the rebellion as a chaotic overreaction, by rural enthusiasts of drinking and abominators of domestic taxation, to a duty that placed new costs on the consumption of a beloved beverage.

Some writers, who do give reasons for what they nevertheless imply was the rebels' mistaken belief that the federal government deliberately created the conditions of their ruin, see the government too as overreacting � as if the awful effects of the tax and the excesses of its enforcement came mainly from insensitivity, not design. Even the few historians who do acknowledge the rebels' embodiment of a long and serious (if often distressingly violent) tradition of dissent from finance policies that Hamilton was perfecting and enforcing fail to draw from the decisions that Hamilton made in suppressing the rebellion any conclusions about the degree to which his finance project explicitly contemplated just such a military triumph over the citizenry � had indeed been constructed partly to achieve such a result.

And all of this seeming confusion flies in the face of Hamilton's very clear statements throughout his letters and reports and the well-known ideas he cogently articulated throughout his career. History has somehow managed to read the Whiskey Rebellion exactly as Hamilton hoped it would.http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/hogeland1.html