I don’t know. It seems to me like John Hancock was a low-down tea smuggler who, like the modern day Koch Brothers, protected his business interests by financing a riot (aka the Boston Tea Party).
So, if the Royal Crown gives the colonies a huge break by eliminating the massive customs duties on imported tea, and thereby lower the price of tea dramatically, you tell people that they’re getting ripped off by the tiny tax that replaces the duties. And then maybe you give them a shilling or two to show up in the harbor with a torch.
With the Tea Act of 1773, the British government pretty much threw in the towel. For the first time, it allowed tea to be shipped directly to the colonies, bypassing London middlemen….
…The Tea Act got rid of the remaining customs duty and left only one tax of three pennies per pound — adding up to less than a quarter of the taxes that had been imposed earlier, and a small fraction of the taxes on tea sold in England…
…The effect of the Tea Act was not to make tea more expensive for colonists, but much less so — and much cheaper than it was in England. The economic losers here were tea smugglers, among them the wealthy merchant John Hancock, who would go on to become the first signer of the Declaration of Independence.
There’s a backstory to how this all happened, which involved the British East India Company promising the government that if they would lower the taxes on tea, it would increase sales and revenues to the government would actually go up. Of course, that didn’t happen.
The Boston Tea Party was a protest about a tax cut. Or, at least, a huge price cut. Everything eventually gets inverted. Something to think about on this, Jesus’s Big Weekend.
