Original Tea Party not about Taxation?

Historian T.H. Breen recently penned an article attempting to dispel some myths about the original Tea Party members.

Among several questionable theories, Mr. Breen offered up the following:

"Second, the colonists did not protest taxation. To be clear: They protested against taxation without representation, an entirely different matter. During the summer of 1774, when Parliament punished the city of Boston for the destruction of the East India Company's tea, people throughout Massachusetts Bay continued to pay taxes to the colonial government. At this chaotic moment, rather than keep their money, colonists voted in town after town to no longer transfer tax revenue to Harrison Gray, a treasurer of loyalist sympathies, but instead to send "moneys which they then had, or in future might have in their hands, belonging to the Province" to one Henry Gardner. Anyone who misses this point risks missing the fact that ordinary American patriots accepted the legitimate burdens of supporting a government in which they enjoyed genuine representation."

Despite Mr. Breen's disingenuous protest that somehow an argument about "taxation without representation" has nothing to do with taxation in general, it's obvious to any observer that the original Tea Party protest was in fact about taxation in general, with no need for any qualifiers.

The reality is, the colonists were plenty annoyed with sending their personal treasure to a far-off government that spent it in ways that the colonists believed was improper.

There are plenty of parallels between the feelings of the colonists and many Americans today, what with the cash we send to Washington DC spent on unnecessary foreign wars, on bailouts of well-connected financial firms and industrial companies and on sustaining a welfare state that is beyond repair.

Attempts by Mr. Breen and others to cloak the original Tea Party in terms of other than an out-and-out tax protest betray a certain level of desperation and suggest that he and others are increasingly nervous that latter-day Tea Partiers are making significant inroads to attracting more and more Americans to their cause, at the expense of the established political parties.