Letter: Tea smugglers were the real beneficiaries

November 06, 2009 11:25 pm

— At the time of the Boston Tea Party, Colonial drinkers of tea couldn’t have been happier with its price. The British import tariff on tea had been removed for the British East India Company so that the tea left Britain duty free and only the much smaller Colonial tariff was added to the price when it arrived. One would have expected the Colonists to welcome this reduction in tax and retail price but one small group didn’t appreciate the tax reduction, the tea smugglers.
Prior to the removal of the British tariff the Boston tea smugglers could price their product below the British East India tea making it much more affordable. With the removal of the British tariff, the tea sold by the British East India Company was now cheaper than the tea sold by the smugglers, making the smuggled tea not nearly as appealing to consumers. What was well known at the time was that the real beneficiaries of the Boston Tea Party were the tea smugglers and that the cause was a dramatic decrease in the tax on tea, not an increase.
Andy Absher
Anderson