Journal pudge's Journal: On Tea Parties 4
I am going to perform my new song Liberty Man at the Tax Day Tea Party on the steps of the Capitol in Olympia. Check out the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's web site for the event, which starts at noon on Wednesday, April 15 (find other events on the web site).
The original Boston Tea Party -- taking place and a few miles north, and 200 years (minus a few months) before I was born -- was not a response to a tax increase, but to a government bailout. The East India Company was in big trouble due to a bad economy and bad management and bad government policies, and Parliament passed the Tea Act in response, which extended the Company's monopoly in the colonies, eliminated a significant tax on the tea in order to undercut the (smuggled) competition, and added a smaller tax for largely symbolic purposes.
Parliament was basically saying, "by purchasing this tea, which costs less than the competition, you concede that that we can tell you what tea to buy, and tax you however we wish." This is why some colonists called the tea the "seeds of slavery." Even if the colonists had representation in Parliament, this would have been intolerable to many of them, because they still would have had to agree that a majority of Parliament could tell them what to do. So they took the object of their offense and dumped it into the harbor.
The Boston Tea Party was not about tax increases, and was not even about representation. It was about self-governance. It was about making their own choices and directing their own paths. Representation doesn't give us that, as we in modern America understand: when your voice in Congress is only 1/435th of the House of Representatives, and this House has massive control over what you can and can't do, the fact of your representation is not meaningful: you still don't have much right to self-governance, which is the real point, not just of the Boston Tea Party, but of the American Revolution itself.
There's a great line by Mel Gibson in The Patriot, during the Revolution: "why would I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?" (Unfortunately, today, a better comparison would be "3,000 tyrants 3,000 miles away.") Gibson's character -- based on Francis Marion, from whom my father's middle name came -- continued, "An elected legislature can trample a man's rights as easily as a king can."
Even if you have representation, that doesn't make you free. You can have all the representation in the world and it doesn't matter if you aren't free. Freedom is actually being able to do as you please, and a legislature -- be it Parliament or Congress -- that is destructive to that end should be altered or abolished by the People.
Some people don't care about being free. Some people just want to be taken care of. They can be bought off with cheap tea. We can't.
Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.
The government only has the power (Score:1)
...that we give to it. We still can vote them out. But the voters have a bigger desire for pork in all its forms than the politicians do. They're(the politicians) only following the majority's lead.
AIG and Goldman Sachs is today's East India Company, for sure. And you notice that the government doesn't want the TARP money back from the smaller banks either, in order to keep some kind of control over them.
I have to ask, don't you find that slave owners who complain about the "seeds of slavery" just a bit iro
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But the voters have a bigger desire for pork in all its forms than the politicians do. They're(the politicians) only following the majority's lead.
That answer is no excuse: we have a Constitution to protect the rights of the minority FROM the majority, and they are ignoring that. We formed a Republic and they treat us like a Democracy, and that is a crime against civil rights.
I have to ask, don't you find that slave owners who complain about the "seeds of slavery" just a bit ironic?
I have to ask, why do you think slave owners said it? :-) Many of the colonists were against slavery. In this case the quote is attributed most specifically to Benjamin Rush [wikipedia.org], a doctor and outspoken abolitionist. There's nothing ironic about it at all.
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In this case the quote is attributed most specifically...
Okay, but the original post did leave that kind of up the the air. He seemed rather open minded on a lot of matters. Don't know about all that bloodletting though... Anyway some of the more famous ones were slave owners, and I tend to question their real feelings about freedom and all people being given equal protection.
Regardless, here we are now, and the majority constantly votes for people who refuse to uphold the constitution, or votes out the one
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Okay, but the original post did leave that kind of up the the air.
Shrug. I don't think of the colonists at the time as "slaveowners," as most of them -- especially the ones most local to where I grew up, in Massachusetts -- were not. It would not occur to me to go out of my way to note that a particular person wasn't one.
Anyway some of the more famous ones were slave owners, and I tend to question their real feelings about freedom and all people being given equal protection.
Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated whether or not Thomas Jefferson meant to include negroes in "all men are created equal" in the fifth of their seven famous debates in 1858. Lincoln, in my estimation, won that debate. He said [nps.gov]: