Boston Tea Party

[Foosinho]

I learned something interesting today... the Boston Tea Party isn't exactly what we were taught it was. Or at least what I was taught it was. (Cross-posted from my blog):
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Contrary to what some would have you believe (http://www.usteaparty.com/) - including your general schooling, if my memory of my youth is correct [edit: including the White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/dreamteam/samueladams.html), which fails to mention that Samuel Adams was a tax collector (http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/signers/adams_s.htm)!] - the Boston Tea Party was not a revolt against high taxes levied against Americans by our British overlords. In matter of fact, it was prompted by a corporate tax handout (http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/cf7c9c870b600b9585256df80075b9dd/1bc5839831cd15ee852570dd0061d496?OpenDocument) designed to benefit the East India Company and crush small American (often smuggling) business by exempting EIC from paying export taxes on tea leaving Britain.

Had Lord North left well enough alone, things might have remained relatively calm. But in 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act. Designed to rescue the ailing East India Company, which was struggling against a crushing debt load, that new legislation granted the company a virtual monopoly over colonial tea sales. Drawing on a huge inventory of unsold tea in its London warehouses, the company prepared to ship 600,000 pounds of tea to the colonies. The company would assign that tea to a few chosen consignees, leaving most American merchants -- including those with a thriving trade in smuggled tea -- completely out of the loop.

Tea exported from Great Britain was usually subject to an export tax, but Parliament agreed to exempt the company from that duty. Lord North again refused to repeal the remaining Townshend duty on tea, still devoted to its symbolic value. But even so, the exemption from export duties would allow the East India Company to sell the tea at rock-bottom prices, undercutting smugglers. American consumers would have enjoyed a windfall: a happy influx of cheap, high-quality British tea.

Instead, they forced ports to refuse shipment, and systematically dumped 342 chests (£10,000 in 1773 money) of tea into the Boston Harbor.

Certainly, there was a general resentment of duties levied by Britain. But those duties had been in place for years. It was the state-sanctioned corporate monopoly enacted by the Stamp Act that undercut colonial importers that provided the spark.

"As American colonists went about their daily affairs in September 1773," Labaree said, "almost all of them ignored the desperate efforts of a few radical patriots to keep alive the spirit of resentment." Only when the Tea Act united antitax feeling with plans for a state-sanctioned monopoly did that resentment again boil over.

Taxes aren't the problem. Unfair tax policies are the problem.

But some tax protests -- including the Boston Tea Party -- have also been infused with a sense of fair play. Americans resent arbitrary and capricious taxes, especially when revenue tools are compromised by special interests. Loopholes and tax preferences are a powerful source of antitax activism.

Hat tip to Best of the Left Podcast (http://www.bestoftheleftpodcast.com/) (you can listen to today's episode - which tipped me to this - here (http://hippiesympathizer.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=110115#)).
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Interesting, yes? Any thoughts on this?

[Norsk Troll]

Taxes aren't the problem. Unfair tax policies are the problem.Not completely. The Americans bringing in tea to the colonies were smuggling it in, and not paying taxes at all. John Hancock had been busted at least once by British authorities for smuggling in tea. Yes, the sentiment might have been anti-competition as well, but it was also "you tax us so much we have to smuggle, when you exempt the East India Company". If they had taxed everyone fairly, whose to say the Americans still wouldn't have revolted, if the British ever shut down the smuggling operations.

[yossarian]

I learned something interesting today... the Boston Tea Party isn't exactly what we were taught it was. Or at least what I was taught it was. (Cross-posted from my blog):
-----
Contrary to what some would have you believe (http://www.usteaparty.com/) - including your general schooling, if my memory of my youth is correct [edit: including the White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/dreamteam/samueladams.html), which fails to mention that Samuel Adams was a tax collector (http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/signers/adams_s.htm)!] - the Boston Tea Party was not a revolt against high taxes levied against Americans by our British overlords. In matter of fact, it was prompted by a corporate tax handout (http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/cf7c9c870b600b9585256df80075b9dd/1bc5839831cd15ee852570dd0061d496?OpenDocument) designed to benefit the East India Company and crush small American (often smuggling) business by exempting EIC from paying export taxes on tea leaving Britain.



Instead, they forced ports to refuse shipment, and systematically dumped 342 chests (£10,000 in 1773 money) of tea into the Boston Harbor.

Certainly, there was a general resentment of duties levied by Britain. But those duties had been in place for years. It was the state-sanctioned corporate monopoly enacted by the Stamp Act that undercut colonial importers that provided the spark.



Taxes aren't the problem. Unfair tax policies are the problem.



Hat tip to Best of the Left Podcast (http://www.bestoftheleftpodcast.com/) (you can listen to today's episode - which tipped me to this - here (http://hippiesympathizer.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=110115#)).
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Interesting, yes? Any thoughts on this?

There was actually a really great article about this (and the legal traditions behind it) in the Harvard Law Review.....I think.....sometime in 2001....I'll have to look. The article discusses many of the things you've mentioned here.

[Foosinho]

There was actually a really great article about this (and the legal traditions behind it) in the Harvard Law Review.....I think.....sometime in 2001....I'll have to look. The article discusses many of the things you've mentioned here.
I would love to read that if you can find it. Despite my educational background - public HS, followed by a BS at a public university (which if you believe what they tell you, should have fully indoctrinated me in liberal propaganda) - I had no idea that the Tea Act actually removed tariffs for the EIC.

[Foosinho]

Not completely. The Americans bringing in tea to the colonies were smuggling it in, and not paying taxes at all. John Hancock had been busted at least once by British authorities for smuggling in tea. Yes, the sentiment might have been anti-competition as well, but it was also "you tax us so much we have to smuggle, when you exempt the East India Company". If they had taxed everyone fairly, whose to say the Americans still wouldn't have revolted, if the British ever shut down the smuggling operations.
If they had actually managed to shut down the black market, then maybe. From what I've read, it seems as if the outrage had actually on the decline, since all the other Acts had been repealed, despite some people working hard agitating to keep the outrage levels up.

[yossarian]

I would love to read that if you can find it. Despite my educational background - public HS, followed by a BS at a public university (which if you believe what they tell you, should have fully indoctrinated me in liberal propaganda) - I had no idea that the Tea Act actually removed tariffs for the EIC.

I spoke too soon in that the Boston Tea Party isn't the real focus of the article. The article is actually about the history of constitutionalism....that is....the history of constitutions as governing documents. There are, however, a few pages of the article that discuss the history of the Boston Tea Party in the context of the role of civil disobedience in constitutionalism. That's what I was recalling.

Sorry for the confusion. If you're still interested, the article is in the November 2001 issue of the Harvard Law Review. The same issue, incidentally, as Laurence Tribe's very interesting dissection of the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision.

[ratdog]

"When contemplating this independence movement, you really regret once again that John Adams is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Adams in order to physically intimidate the rebels, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors." - Ann Coulter, address before the Royal Political Action Conference, 1773

[PsychedelicCeltic]

So you're arguing that the USA never should have revolted, meaning we would still be united under the Crown, coincidentally becoming an elite football, cricket and rugby playing nation?

Sounds good to me.

[ratdog]

So you're arguing that the USA never should have revolted, meaning we would still be united under the Crown, coincidentally becoming an elite football, cricket and rugby playing nation?

Sounds good to me.

To whom is this directed?

If at me, I was only making fun of Ann Coulter and pointing out that if today's right-wingers had been around back then, they'd have hated the very Founders they now claim to revere.

[Norsk Troll]

if today's right-wingers had been around back then ...Today's right wingers WERE around back then. Only they were called Tories at the time.

[DJPoopypants]

Today's right wingers WERE around back then. Only they were called Tories at the time.

There's a few current right wingers that deserve a good tar and feathering, don't ya think?

What did Patrick Henry say again? "Activist Judges? We don't need no steenkin activist judges!"

[ratdog]

Today's right wingers WERE around back then. Only they were called Tories at the time.

True to a certain extent but there are important differences. Today's right-wingers, at least in America, have to try to fit the square peg of their authoritarian right-wing beliefs into the round hole of America's mostly lefty liberal founding and spiritual tradition. If you pay attention to the history of "conservative" politico-economic thought in America, you see this tension pop up again and again. Usually this attempt to fuse two incompatible elements manifests itself in right-wing efforts to revise history by forcing the revered "Founders" to mouth ideas that they plainly did not hold: for example, the Religious Right's pitiful attempt to portray "the Founders" as Christian fundamentalists.

Of course, almost everyone on any side wants to claim "the Founders" as exclusively their own because that's the cheapest and quickest way they can then try to legitimate their views as "the original Americanism". The trouble is that anyone who tries to legitimate their current beliefs by appealing to the past rather than the present or the future inveitably gets stuck to at least some degree with trying to square the circle as described above. Couple this problem with a near-universal ignorance of the intellectual, economic and political climate of the 18th century and you get some really bizarre argument from both the Right and the Left but mainly on the Right as they're almost by definition the group more likely to appeal to "tradition" and "original meaning".