Although different from taxation, I think one could see parallels with government taking over a major corporation and then sending letters to car dealerships saying that they will be closed. How can a politician take away my livelihood? Who voted for that?? It’s like a law was passed. It’s not like I can petition my local representative and try to plead my case — the car czar says my business is over, and that’s that.
“From what I can find, the taxes that were to be levied via the required tax stamps were inconsequential...”
What brought you to that conclusion? Everything I’ve read has quite the opposite conclusion.
The Stamp Act of 1765
The act placed a tax on virtually every paper transaction. Marriage certificates, ships’ papers, legal documents, newspapers, even playing cards and dice. Worse, the act raised the terrifying threat that if paper documents were subject to government taxation and control, how long before Puritan, Baptist, Quaker, and Methodist religious tracts or even Bibles came under oversight by the state? To assume as much was not unrealistic, and certainly Sam Adams argued that this was the logical end-point. “The Stamp-Act itself was contrived with a design only to inure the people to the habit of contemplating themselves as slaves of men, and the transition from thence to a subjection to Satan, is mighty easy.”
Hostility to the new act ran far deeper that its narrow impact on newspapers, however. An often overlooked component of the policies involved the potential for EVER-EXPANDING HORDES OF ADMINISTRATORS AND DUTY COLLECTORS in the colonies. Had the pecuniary burdens been completely inconsequential, the colonists still would have protested the INSIDIOUS, INVASIVE PRESENCE OF AN ARMY OF ROYAL BUREAUCRATS AND CUSTOMS OFFICIALS. Several organizations were formed for the specific purpose of harassing stamp agents, many under the name of Sons of Liberty. They engaged in violence and intimidation of English officials, destroying the stamps and burning the Boston house of the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson. SYMPATHETIC COLONIAL JURIES THEN REFUSED TO CONVICT MEMBERS OF THE SONS OF LIBERTY, demonstrating that the colonists saw the economic effects as nil, but the political ramifications as substantial.
The above was just a bit of what you can find in this book:
A Patriot’s History of the United States - Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen
(CAPS are mine.)
if obama was alive i bet he would support the stamp act.....
How to load a musket:
powder
newspaper wad
shot (most muskets were used as shotguns)
newspaper wad
You do the math. An ammo tax, or for a colonist, a food tax on sources of protein.
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The French and Indian War ended in 1763; New York City was the North American base for the British Command, and after the war, they pulled out.
The Brit pull-out had a devastating effect on the economy of NYC, and a depression ensued; remember, NYC was then--as it is now--a commercial center. When insult was added to injury with the Stamp Act, outrage led to the Stamp Act Congress. Between 1765 and 1770, revolutionary activity centered in NYC; after that, it moved to Boston (see The Battle of Golden Hill.
As far as its relevance to now, all I can say is that overtaxing can always have consequences.
Thank you for raising the point, devane617.