RE: How Much Too Much
This thread really should go in the Spin Room, and I won't cry one bit if it does wind up there. That being said, yes, the Boston Tea Party was organized by a bunch of smugglers. However, they were fighting a company that, IMO, is/was very, eerily similar to Walmart, a retail store well-known for putting "mom & pop" stores out of business. The East India Company threatened to do just that in the Thirteen Colonies. To combat the East India Company, the colonial merchants banded together and staged the Boston Tea Party. Had the East India Company been located in the Thirteen Colonies, much swifter action would have been brought against the colonial merchants & smugglers, IMO, because the colonial governors made sure to maintain order in the Thirteen Colonies, for the most part. However, seeing how the East India Company was a foreign monopoly and was threatening local jobs & money collected for local taxes, the colonial governors just turned a blind eye toward such events as the Boston Tea Party, IMO.
The colonists of the Thirteen Colonies were fighting against taxation without representation, not taxation itself. The Thirteen Colonies had no voice in Parliament whatsoever, neither did they want a voice in Parliament. They considered their colonial legislatures to be their equivalent of Parliament, not the official Parliament in London. However, the colonists still claimed King George III to be their king, up until Battles of Lexington & Concord. When King George III sent troops to enforce Parliament's unpopular laws, the colonists considered that as King George III either stepping down from his position with the colonies, or committing treason against the colonies. It was because of this action, that the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain.
After the Thirteen Colonies won their independence, and then signed the Constitution of the United States of America, the U.S. Congress enacted a tax on whiskey. A group of farmers in western Pennsylvania revolted against the tax, and I want to say, they tarred and feathered the tax collector. President George Washington gathered up troops and began to march on western Pennsylvania to put down the revolt and enforce the tax. When the farmers got news of this, they ceased their revolt, and paid the tax. Big difference in how the two situations were handled.
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