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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4230814" data-attributes="member: 4937">The Boston Tea Party is particularly apt because, among other things...a) The participants apparantly knew that the act that they were participating in was 'chaotic' as evidenced by the fact that they dressed as (to thier mind) barbarians when they did it.  They recognized the act as something that normal members of the society would not in fact do.b) There was no existing ethical code at the time which would have endorsed vandalism in response to a burdensome tax.  Consider that it wasn't even the property of the King who they were protesting against that was destroyed.  There was nothing just or proportional in the retaliation by any normal legal or ethical standard.c) The ethical standard by which the participants justified thier act, that a tax is not moral if it is imposed without the (presumably majority) consent of the persons being taxed ('No taxation without representation!'), was not only a wholy novel idea, but one an inherently 'chaotic' one is as much as it claims social or civic authority is subservient to the individual right to choose.d) The British Empire against which the colonist were revolting was so far from being an extremely unjust, unfair, unrepresentative, and tyrannical state that it could probably have been considered the most just, most fair, most representative, and least tyrannical empire that hithertoo the world had ever seen.  This is afterall the same empire which is by this time more or less jointly run by an elected Parliment, gaurantees basic rights to its citizens, and will shortly use its naval power to end maritime slave trafficing the world over.  And yet, for all the fact that its not an overly unjust society, the colonists are claiming absolute moral authority based solely on the fact that they don't have the liberty to govern themselves as they see fit.e) The expressed goal of the act is not to increase American power or even personal ambition (no one stole the tea and resold it), but simply to secure liberties.</blockquote>

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