Incident in Boston Harbor: three views

"It's also worth remembering that the Boston Tea party wasn't a complaint about high taxes but a complaint about reducing the import duty on tea to almost zero. That meant that the tea-smugglers couldn't compete with the legitimate importer (the East India Company) which is why the smugglers staged their raid and tipped the tea overboard."

Commenter Dearieme showing his/her woeful ignorance at Freeborn John's.

"To save the failing British East India Company, [Parliament] passed the Tea Act, giving the company a monopoly on the sale of tea to the colonies, cutting out our honest American merchants and smugglers alike. The enraged colonists retaliated by refusing to allow the tea to be off-loaded in American ports.

On December 16, 1773, 150 men dressed as Mohawks boarded three British chips in Boston Harbor and,, as thousands watched, dumped the cargo of tea overboard."

Patrick J Buchanan - The Great Betrayal, 1998

"The East India company, who till that time had never sent a pound of tea to America on their own account, step forth on that occasion the asserters of parliamentary right, and send hither many ship loads of that obnoxious commodity. The masters of their several vessels however, on their arrival in America, wisely attended to admonition, and returned with their cargoes. In the province of New England alone the remonstrances of the people were disregarded, and a compliance, after being many days waited for, was flatly refused. Whether in this the master of the vessel was governed by his obstinacy or his instructions, let those who know, say. There are extraordinary situations which require extraordinary interposition. An exasperated people, who feel that they possess power, are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular. A number of them assembled in the town of Boston, threw the tea into the ocean and dispersed without doing any other act of violence. If in this they did wrong, they were known, and were amenable to the laws of the land, against which it could not be objected that they had ever in any instance been obstructed or diverted from their regular course in favor of popular offenders. They should therefore not have been distrusted on this occasion. But that illfated colony had formerly been bold in their enmities against the house of Stuart, and were now devoted to ruin by that unseen hand which governs the momentous affairs of this great empire. On the partial representations of a few worthless ministerial dependants, whose constant office it has been to keep that government embroiled, and who by their treacheries hope to obtain the dignity of the British knighthood, without calling for a party accused, without asking a proof, without attempting a distinction between the guilty and the innocent, the whole of that antient and wealthy town is in a moment reduced from opulence to beggary."

Thomas Jefferson - A Summary View of the Rights of British America, July 1774