The Observation Deck

ryan costa wrote:Some survivalists pack guns and ammo in oil and bury the containers. I wonder if the same thing would work for cigars and cigarettes....

yep, ammo will last for decades even a century if stored properly

I think we need to stop taxing everything under the sun. It is a pretty well respected fact that taxes on consumables only hurt the people who are already struggling to make ends meet. Instead of taxing all this stuff we need to start addressing Government waste. Taxes on stuff like cigarettes, beer, and cigars as well as many others are just an easy way for the underworked greedy politicians to do less work. What we should be doing is cutting the waste in government. Do politicians need all the “perksâ€Â

Stephen Eisel wrote:Why did they not put a tax where it belongs on the companies that are impacting the health of our children and their ignorant parents? We need a revolution!

Ahh, what's old is new again...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies despite a lack of representation in the Westminster Parliament. One of the protesters was John Hancock. In 1768, Hancock's ship Liberty was seized by customs officials, and he was charged with smuggling. He was defended by John Adams, and the charges were eventually dropped. However, Hancock later faced several hundred more indictments.

Hancock organized a boycott of tea from China sold by the British East India Company, whose sales in the colonies then fell from 320,000 pounds (145,000 kg) to 520 pounds (240 kg). By 1773, the company had large debts, huge stocks of tea in its warehouses and no prospect of selling it because smugglers, such as Hancock, were importing tea without paying import taxes. The British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly and without "payment of any customs or duties whatsoever" in Britain, instead paying the much lower American duty. This tax break allowed the East India Company to sell for lower prices than those offered by the colonial merchants and smugglers.

American colonists, particularly the wealthy smugglers, resented this favored treatment of a major company, which employed lobbyists and wielded great influence in Parliament. Protests resulted in both Philadelphia and New York, but it was those in Boston that made their mark in history. Still reeling from the Hutchinson letters, Bostonians suspected the new Tea Tax was simply another attempt by the British Parliament to squash American freedom. Samuel Adams, wealthy smugglers and others who had profited from the smuggled tea, called for agents and consignees of the East India Company tea to abandon their positions; consignees who hesitated were terrorized through attacks on their warehouses and even their homes.[1]

The first of many ships carrying the East India Company tea was HMS Dartmouth arriving in late November 1773. A standoff ensued between the port authorities and the Sons of Liberty. Samuel Adams whipped up the growing crowd by demanding a series of protest meetings. Coming from both the city and outlying areas, thousands attended these meetings; every meeting larger than the one before. The crowds shouted defiance not only at the British Parliament, the East India Company, and HMS Dartmouth but at Governor Thomas Hutchinson as well, who was still struggling to have the tea landed. On the night of December 16, the protest meeting, held at Boston's Old South Meeting House, was the largest yet seen. An estimated 8,000 people were said to have attended.

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The East India Tea company was given a monopoly charter by England. It was essentially run like a utility company, though limitations of communication and the vastness of their activities allowed a lot of autonomy within the system.

The American smuggling system did a lot to help America develop self-sufficiency. The Boycots gave them practice working together for common causes. Interestingly enough, Bill O'Reilly asserts that Boycots are "un-American".

Had the American Revolution taken place 40 or 50 years later, the tories and the british would have framed it as a socialist revolution of the colonists to redistribute the Northwest Territories to themselves. Fortunately for us, polar paradigms of capitalism and socialism didn't exist at the time.