Your public education sucked. No, the Boston Tea Party wasn't about "rioting and looting". It was a tax protest, and tea wasn't stolen--it was dumped in the harbor. Stealing is not about Floyd's murder; it's a self-serving rationalization.— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) May 28, 2020
The other day, in the aftermath of ongoing post-Floyd murder scattered riots nationwide, a Twitter thread surfaced comparing the riots to the Boston Tea Party. I responded with the above embedded tweet to one of the racial identity trolls spamming the thread; I struck a cord with the reply tweet attracting a decent 300 impressions to date. I want to expand on those comments to an extent the 280 character limit doesn't enable.
Let's review American history. The colonists prized self-determination; they didn't necessarily reject a British affiliation, but they wanted to be treated as equal British citizens. The British had imposed the first direct taxes on colonists with the 1765 Stamp Act, in essence to defray imperial expenses from the recent French and Indian War, imposed without the knowledge and consent of the colonists through representation in Parliament. Parliament expanded its newly asserted taxing authority with the 1767/1768 Townshend Acts on a variety of goods that were imported into the colonies, including tea. The revenue from these acts were used to fund Crown-loyal government administrators over the colonies, versus the colonies' own governments. It wasn't so much the amount of the taxes (English citizens had a much higher tax burden), but the principle and the precedent being established. The colonists resented this and looked for workarounds to British supply monopolies, including the smuggling of much cheaper Dutch tea. Many prominent patriots, like John Hancock, were involved in the lucrative smuggling trade. I've seen estimates that over 80% of the tea being consumed in the colonies were smuggled, and the politically connected East India Company's sales were hurt.
The 1773 Tea Act was basically a corporate welfare act, allowing East India Company a supplier monopoly to the American colonies, allowing the company to sell directly (without middlemen), and exempting duties that had to be passed along to the colonists--but retained the relatively modest Townshend Act three-pence tea tax, mostly for symbolic reasons over Parliament's right to tax the colonies and underwriting the cost of staffing Crown administrators. The net effect was that East India was able to sell tea to the colonists much cheaper, undermining the lucrative smuggling trade. Even though the real tax burden (English import duties) had been reduced, the revolutionaries resented this toehold of direct taxation by the remote Parliament.
The patriots tried to pressure consignees from receiving the shipments, but Royal Massachusetts Governor Hutchinson refused to allow the ships to leave without paying the relevant duties. On December 16, 1773, roughly 140 Sons of Liberty protesters, disguised as Mohawk Indians (symbolizing in part native American independence from British allegiance), climbed onto 3 relevant ships (Beaver, Dartmouth, and Eleanor), each containing more than 100 chests of Chinese-origin tea, and dumped all the cargo, into the harbor, roughly $1.7M of damage. Only 1 participant tried to steal tea and was stopped.
It should be noted that many revolutionaries, including George Washington, condemned the destruction of private property (the dumped tea). The British response included the Intolerable Acts, which basically provided the context for the Revolutionary War. One of the responses was to shutter Boston harbor until the property damage was repaid. Reportedly Benjamin Franklin offered to repay the East India Company for its losses if the British would lift its blockade, but the Crown refused. Note that there were subsequent sympathy raids down the coast.
Any comparison of the post-Floyd riots, looting and property damage to the Boston Tea Party is ludicrous on its face. The Sons of Liberty were highly organized and principled; there was no loss of life; they even swept up after themselves and replaced a broken padlock. Nobody personally gained from the destruction of the cargo (well, maybe smugglers in the aftermath of shortages of tea).
Stealing electronics from Target was spontaneous and opportunistic; Target had no connection whatsoever to George Floyd's murder. Violence and property damage were random and unfocused. There have been reports of black business owners putting signs in store windows, pleading for rioters to spare them. People are being hurt or killed. All of these violate unalienable rights to life, liberty and property.
None of this addresses the core issues facing urban minorities. We libertarians have been pleading for things like an end to qualified immunity, which basically exempts public servants from liability for misconduct. We continue to argue for overdue criminal justice reform, occupational licensing reform, ending prosecution of victimless crimes, unjust policies like mandatory sentences.
