Revolutions have been fought over exactly this throughout history... Of course our citizens are a special kind of lazy sheeple.
Actually No. Revolutions have always been about something much more basic:
Hunger.
See French Revolution which followed the failure of harvests. Or the Arab Spring of 2008, which followed an unprecedented rise in the global price of food. As soon as food prices fell (because the hedge funds went back to speculating on oil instead of wheat), things subsided.
There's a reason the Emperors of Rome had a principle of "bread and circuses". They literally doled out free wheat to everyone for centuries, and had child poverty laws for everyone who lived within the empire whether citizen or provincial. The senator Cicero spent some time complaining about how this practice reduced productivity, corrupted the spirit and supported lazy people, but the emperors ignored him - and were probably right to do so - they kept the peace for 800 years and the Roman empire enjoyed a very high overall standard of civilization that wasn't equaled again till the 18th century.
The modern welfare state is the modern version of the Roman state.
The "lazy sheeple" will only revolt if they're hungry. It's not rational to rock the boat and risk your life, livelihood and property for "ideals", it never has been. The sheeple are actually smart, and those calling for the sheeple to revolt while they sit on their backsides are being disingenuous.
In the same way, people like myself are happy to pay taxes to feed some of the sheeple, because we've worked out that anarchy caused by having a mass of hungry people destabilizing things is much more expensive. Again, it's a rational response which the idealists tend to find difficult to understand.
P.S. The American "revolution" was not a true revolution - it was about American oligarchs protecting their
own interests when they diverged from Britain's interests - e.g. Britain negotiated a treaty with the Indian tribes because it was expensive for the British taxpayer to have to keep sending troops across the Atlantic to defend Americans who weren't paying taxes and kept making incursions into Indian land and then hollering for British help. But the oligarchs wanted to continue to try to take Indian land to increase their own wealth. And of course slavery - Britain was in the process of abolishing it and the American oligarchs wanted to keep it. Hence the break-up between the two countries (which got dressed up by the Americans in a lot of "freedom" rhetoric to gull the average person into fighting for the interests of oligarchs like Jefferson).
