Reddit reviews The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty

Certainly citizens create governments in the first place but that doesn't change the fact that without government you can't maintain the complex society these "sovereign citizens" take for granted. Without it there are no roads. There are no trucks. There are no guns. Obviously that doesn't mean we have to love our current governments. But we should recognize the benefits they provide.

As for the Whiskey Rebellion, I'm actually pretty well informed. I've read most of the publicly available books and taken advantage of local resources. I live in Western PA. In fact, spent bullets from the Battle of Bower Hill could well have landed on what is now my front yard. The most recent work, William Hogeland's The Whiskey Rebellion is very readable and gives a good overview of frontier discontent with eastern governments.

But I would say that a good place to start would be the classic The Whiskey Rebellion by Thomas Slaughter. It covers the basic misconceptions such as the idea that the unrest was due to whiskey itself. You see, transportation was so difficult that distilling was the only way for trans-Appalachian farmers to get their crops to market with a chance to make a profit. Also whiskey was relatively compact, stable, and fungible. With the chronic shortage of hard currency it was frequently used as a substitute medium of exchange. In the East a tax on whiskey was a tax on entertainment. In the West a tax on whiskey was a tax on life. A tax far too many families couldn't afford.

Westerners objected to the whiskey tax on this basis. Not that the central government didn't have the authority to tax them but that the tax was punitive in the backwoods. It was especially galling given that the government was failing to do what Westerners wanted most: exterminate the Indians. After Falling Timbers life became much safer for the white invaders and Western discontent subsided somewhat though periodic agrarian unrest remained a fact of life in the new nation until 1811 when the 1st Bank of the United States (with its tight money policies) lost its charter.