Bracing Brew

The Tea Party movement is a healthy reminder that the United States began as a tax revolt. From the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, when the American colonists first called their representatives together to declare their “undoubted right . . . that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent,” to the Boston Tea Party eight years later, when the Sons of Liberty dumped a shipload of tea into the harbor rather than accept Britain’s right to tax that normally soothing commodity, the Founding Fathers militantly denied that “all the fruits of [the colonists’] labour and industry may be taken from [them] whenever an avaricious governor and a rapacious council may incline to demand them,” as future chief justice John Jay put it in 1775.