Why did the colonists hate taxes so much?

The evidence becomes overwhelming that Americans opposed seemingly light taxes, not because they were paranoid, but because the taxes were charged in silver bullion, a money few colonists used on a regular basis and most never had.  Thomas Paine had outlined the logic of resistance in June 1780.  “There are two distinct things which make the payment of taxes difficult; the one is the large and real value of the sum to be paid, and the other is the scarcity of the thing in which the payment is to be made.”…Adam Gordon, an MR for Aberdeenshire who was traveling in Virginia in 1765, wrote that he was “at a loss to find how they,” some of the wealthiest colonists in the New World, Virginia’s slave-driving tobacco planters, “will find Specie, to pay the Duties last imnosed on them by the Parliament.”

That is from the new and excellent Money and the Making of the American Revolution, by Andrew David Edwards.