The 240th Anniversary of the Boston Tea Party

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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.








Some libertarians, including Charles Adams himself, object to the Boston Tea Party as an attack on private property. Classifying the East India Company as “private” however, would not be quite accurate. It is important to note that the East India Company, earlier in the century, had been bailed out by the British government by being merged wit the John Company in an early example of the Too Big to Fail doctrine at work. As a government monopolist enjoying special favors from the Empire, the East India company at the time was “private” in the way that the government sponsored enterprise Fannie Mae was “private” before it collapsed and became a de facto property of the Federal government itself. Yes, many private investors had sunk money into the enterprise, but the East India Company itself was, for all practical purposes, an arm of the Imperial government created to enhance the mercantilist goals of the British Crown.  Thus, when they attacked the East India Company, the colonists saw their act as an attack on the Crown itself.

To this day, the Boston Tea Party remains an effective symbol of protest against the crony capitalism of national elites, and in the United States today, as we face an increasingly mercantilist and even fascist regime, the Boston Tea Party is as relevant as ever.

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