The Boston Tea Party?

Today is the 240th anniversary of the act of civil disobedience against taxation, corporatism, and colonialism known as the Boston Tea Party.

The economics of the situation that precipitated the event were quite complex, however, and about more than a simple tax increase on tea. As noted here by Edmond Bradley, a monopoly over the tea trade had been granted to favored corporate interests by the British Crown, which made the price of tea artificially high to begin with.

Charles Beard in his The Rise of American Civilization frames the conflict as a matter of “Colony vs Metropolis” in which the metropolitan center of government power in London exploited the people in the colonies through crony capitalist/corporatist policy.

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