History of New England political freedoms and local democracy, which they felt was increasingly threatened by the English government. The main grievance was taxation, which colonists argued could only be imposed by their own legislatures and not by the Parliament in London. Their political cry was "no taxation without representation." A ship was planning to land tea in Boston on December 16, 1773, and Patriots associated with the Sons of Liberty raided the ship and dumped all the tea into the harbor. This Boston Tea Party outraged British officials, and the King and Parliament decided to punish Massachusetts, passing the Intolerable Acts in 1774.
Taxation as slavery existed only for the benefit of the mother country, but Americans saw any form of taxation as slavery." Anarchists are some of the foremost proponents of the argument that taxation is equivalent to slavery. The International Society for Individual Liberty has made this claim, as has Bureaucrash, which refers to Social Security as "social slavery." George Mason University professor Thomas Rustici uses two hypothetical anecdotes to illustrate this point. In the first, Sam Slime mugs a person for £50. In the second, Sam Slime votes for a politician who taxes a person in order to redistribute £50 to the "disadvantaged"