In 1770, England placed a tax on tea that was sold in the American colonies. The issue of “taxation without representation” angered the colonists, who began to smuggle tea into the New World to avoid the taxes. Tea sales dropped by approximately 70% as early Americans boycotted the product.
Three years later, the East India Trading Company, with an excess of tea and facing bankruptcy, persuaded the Crown to allow it – and only it – to sell tea in the colonies without the tax. Furious tea merchants, who could not compete with the East India Company’s prices due to their favourable treatment by the English government, revolted. Colonists, angered by the taxes and then the callous actions of the Crown, joined in to protest the de facto monopoly.
The colonists tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent East India’s ships from reaching the harbour and docking. On 16 December 1773, a group of four dozen revolutionaries, disguised as Native Americans, boarded the East India Company’s ships in Boston Harbour and threw 342 boxes of tea overboard. The Boston Tea Party protested the taxation imposed on the colonies, the lack of representation in a remote and unresponsive government, and an instrusion into private commerce.
A government need not prohibit a certain man from going into business to ensure that he cannot be in it; nor it need grant a monopoly by law in order to create one. It does not need to prohibit members of a certain political party from gaining office in order to hinder their efforts.
The “stimulus” bill and TARP subsidise some favoured companies, banks, and people at the expense of those that the government does not take as kindly to. Any company whose cost of doing business decreases is given an advantage over its competitors, not on the basis of excellence or ingenuity, but on the basis of favourable government treatment – bought and paid for by its competitors and the American people. Less costly and more ingenious ideas, rather than pushing the American economy forward, will be sidelined as the government artificially lowers the cost and increases the resources given to more expensive and less effective business models, inventions, and ideas.
A well-meaning attempt to discount the cost of a mortgage blocks tax-paying renters from the homeownership market by giving their tax money to mortgagees and driving up the cost of housing.
Government funding to media outlets ensures that the marketplace of ideas will never flourish, but will be dominated by newspapers and TV shows that find favour with the current administration. Americans no longer have the option to boycott a particularly odious news source or business: their tax dollars force them to subscribe.
Against this, we protest.