The T-bagger’s idea of a tea party!

[proud2BlibKansan]

Teabagging



You Mean Tea Doesn’t Come from Teabags?

[patrice]

1. It's also hilarious that THE original Tea Party was a response to a TAX CUT

on certain teas, East India Company teas I assume, that competed with other teas that were bought, sold, and traded amongst the tea shops that constituted a significant portion of early Colonial small businesses.

[Warpy]

2. Well, not really

England back in those days was extremely protectionist. All products from new world manufacturing or trade were heavily taxed to keep jobs in England, thereby making it impossible for business people and traders to make much of a profit in the new world. Merchants could sell English goods at a reasonable price or colonial goods at a hugely inflated price because of the taxes, discouraging anyone from producing goods or importing things independently of the English corporations.

Since the system was strangling the colonies, they rebelled.

[patrice]

3. So the English were selling their tea at a lower tax rate or at a lower price?

[Warpy]

5. At the time of the tea party, both

Smuggled tea was escaping the high duty, so they dropped their own tea tax to undercut the smugglers and bankrupt them.

The whole point wasn't TEA, it was that every single enterprise in the New World was being crippled by English protectionism.

The tea was just the last straw.

[rationalcalgarian]

4. Wish I knew more about this, but

another explanation for the tax cut on tea is that it was an attempt to stem the import of smuggled tea. By lowering and almost eliminating the tax on tea, the British government hoped to cripple the smuggled tea economy and maintain its own monopoly. The smugglers, led by John Hancock, stood to lose the equivalent of today's millions as they could not compete with the new, cheap price of English tea so, by disguising themselves as native Indians, boarding three English ships in Boston Harbor and destroying several tons of tea and looting and burning a few warehouses along the way, they essentially eliminated the English stock. Colonists had no choice, afterwards, than to buy from the smugglers. With the help of the master propagandist Sam Adams, the smuggler cartel was able to stir up enough fear and ill-will amongst the colonists toward the English that they joined with the smugglers to boycott whatever remained of the English tea supply and, in a fit of patriotism, purchased only "American" tea, even though it was more expensive.
The parallel to today's "Teabaggers" is noteworthy: frightened, uninformed and easily manipulated people protesting with blind, almost pathological fury against something that, if they thought about it, would actually be a good thing for them.

Like I said at the outset, I wish I knew more about this. This is but one of the interpretations I've come across.

I'm a coffee guy, anyway. :donut: