Tea, Taxes, and the Revolution - By Grover G. Norquist

When demonstrations erupted nationwide in March and April 2009 in opposition to the tax and spending policies of the just-inaugurated Barack Obama administration, the protesters named their movement and cause after the Boston Tea Party of Dec. 16, 1773, when Massachusetts colonists dumped British tea into Boston Harbor in the world's most famous tax revolt. Thus was the "Tea Party" movement reborn.

The Tea Party name suggests an anti-tax protest rooted in American history and consistent with the original intent of our nation's founding. If one is grabbing the political high ground in an American debate, this is the equivalent of placing your cannons atop Bunker Hill. (The Tea Party, it is worth noting, is assigning itself the winning team in that previous conflict.)

Is the comparison accurate or invented? How does the level and modes of taxation in modern America compare with the taxation of the British colonies, which led to an eight-year war that cost 25,000 American lives and ultimately broke apart the British Empire to create the United States of America? What parallels or paradoxes exist?

Americans often observe that our national independence was born of a tax revolt. But taxes, or the lack thereof, played a key role in the colonies long before Samuel Adams and his Sons of Liberty. The 1629 Charter of Massachusetts Bay granted settlers a seven-year exemption from customs taxes on all trade to and from Britain and a 21-year exemption from all other taxes. In 1621, the Dutch government granted the Dutch West India Company an eight-year exemption from all trade duties between New Amsterdam/New York and the mother country. Swedish settlers in Delaware were offered a 10-year tax exemption. America, in other words, was in part created as a tax haven populated with immigrants moving from high-tax nations to low-tax colonies.

By 1714, British citizens in Great Britain were paying on a per capita basis 10 times as much in taxes as the average "American" in the 13 colonies, though some colonies had higher taxes than others. Britons, for example, paid 5.4 times as much in taxes as taxpayers in Massachusetts, 18 times as much as Connecticut Yankees, 6.3 times as much as New Yorkers, 15.5 times as much as Virginians; and 35.8 times as much as Pennsylvanians.

Low-taxed Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn, the father of American religious liberty, who also notably refused the Pennsylvania General Assembly's kind offer to establish an import and export tax for his personal benefit.

Taxation in the colonies consisted of property taxes, poll taxes on men over 18, excise taxes, and forced labor contributions of a few days a month to build roads and assume other "public functions" such as constable, assessor, or "hog reeve" ("an officer charged with the prevention or appraising of damages by stray swine," according to the Oxford English Dictionary).

Massachusetts imposed an embryonic income tax in 1634 in the form of a "faculty" tax. In 1643, Alvin Rabushka writes in Taxation in Colonial America, "assessors were appointed to rate inhabitants on their estates and their faculties, which included personal abilities." One notes with some envy that the tax came to about 1 percent of what we might call income.

Connecticut, anticipating New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's nanny-state tendencies, imposed sumptuary laws in 1676 that taxed any person who wore silk ribbons, gold or silver lace, or gold or silver buttons.

By 1775, the British government was consuming one-fifth of its citizens' GDP, while New Englanders were only paying between 1 and 2 percent of their income in taxes. British citizens were also weighed down with a national debt piled up by years of worldwide warfare that amounted to £15 for each of the crown's eight million subjects, while American local and colonial governments were almost debt-free. Against this backdrop, Americans watched as the British monarchy attempted to raise taxes on the colonists to pay down its war debt and pay for the 10,000 British soldiers barracked in the colonies.

The Sugar Act of 1764, a rewrite of the Plantation Duty of 1673, was designed to raise revenue rather than force the colonies to trade with England alone, and fell mostly on molasses, sugar, and Madeira wine. The colonies reacted particularly poorly to the imposition of the Stamp Act of 1765, which was an effort to impose a direct tax on the colonies rather than tax imports and exports. Benjamin Franklin and others argued to the British government that while the colonies did not object to tariffs, they did oppose direct domestic "taxation without representation."

The British parliament got the message, repealing the Stamp Act and responding with the Townshend Acts of 1767, which imposed duties on 72 items, including tea (the changes actually reduced taxes on tea originally imported from British colonies to combat the smuggling of Dutch tea to America). Although the British repealed most of these duties in 1770, they maintained the specific tax on tea to make the point that the crown could tax when it chose to do so. By then, however, the American colonists had stopped distinguishing between domestic and trade taxes and started opposing all taxation and control by Britain, setting the stage for the revolution.

The bottom line: American colonists were both paid more and taxed less than the British. American taxes, in fact, were low and going lower, but the very idea that they had been raised and could be raised again by a distant power was enough to send Americans into the streets to engage in civil disobedience. Regime change followed the tax revolt.

And 239 years later, what has changed?

How Did the British Press Cover the American Revolution? - By Eliga H. Gould

Thomas Jefferson was worried. The year was 1784, and he was in Europe to negotiate trade agreements on behalf of the newly independent United States. But the republic had a problem with its image. So Jefferson decided to set the record straight with an article in Europe's leading newspaper, the French-language Gazette of Leiden. "America," he wrote, characterizing the prevailing view, "is a scene of ... riot and anarchy." According to European newspapers, Congress was weak, the states were in turmoil, and people were fleeing to Canada. None of this was true, Jefferson assured the Gazette's readers. The trouble was that printers on the continent had "not yet got into the habit of taking the American newspapers. Whatever they retail ... on the subject of America, they take from the English." And the English view was not flattering.

Today, as the Arab Spring roils the Middle East, mixing hopes for reform with fears of betrayal, it is worth remembering that we have been here before. More than 200 years ago, the American Revolution captured the world's attention much as events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria have over the past year. Then as now, most of what people knew about foreign events came from the media. In Jefferson's day, the leading outlets were pamphlets, journals, and newspapers, not the electronic venues that currently predominate. Yet the effect was the same: Some of the information was accurate, while a good deal was not. Either way, Britain was the chief international source for news about America, and British writers had a lot to say.

Because the British press was the freest in the world at the time, opinion on the revolution was hardly uniform. For people on the margins of British politics -- manufacturers in cities that were not represented in Parliament, humble men and women who shouldered much of the war's fiscal burden without having a say in its conduct, and religious dissenters of all descriptions -- the American Revolution was an event to be celebrated: a "new order for the ages," in the words of the motto that Congress adopted for the United States, and an example to be followed. Although outright support was limited, several of England's most popular newspapers expressed sympathy for what the Westminster Chronicle called their "brethren" in America. George Washington, in particular, was widely admired, with even hostile papers depicting the general as "a man of sense and great integrity," in the words of Edinburgh's Scots Magazine. Americans, wrote Thomas Pownall, a former British governor of Massachusetts and friend of Benjamin Franklin, in a widely read pamphlet from 1783, were the New World's "chosen people."

But many Britons took a different view of the United States, and they found a receptive audience among readers of newspapers that supported the British government. As with the Arab Spring today, the British felt threatened by the American Revolution in part because their own country had done so well under the order that the revolution sought to topple. Writing in 1776, the author of an English pamphlet warned that the loss of America would dismember Britain's empire by "inclosing [sic] us within the confined seas of England, Ireland, and Scotland." Mindful that Congress was seeking allies in Europe, others worried that Britain's rivals, especially France and Spain, would use the Revolutionary War to expand their empires at Britain's expense, and there were fears that George III's colonies in Canada and the West Indies might someday follow the Americans' example. Whether America's bid for independence succeeded or failed, Britain stood to lose a great deal from the attempt.

In an echo of worries about the fate of minority groups in the Middle East today, the United States also encountered scathing criticism because of Americans' treatment of blacks and Native Americans. In Taxation No Tyranny, published in 1774, Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the first modern English dictionary and an influential British writer, set the tone, asking readers how it was "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes." During the Revolutionary War, some of the most militarily powerful Native American nations in North America heeded the danger to their own interests and sided with Britain. Equally threatening to slaveholders like Jefferson, enslaved African Americans in Virginia and the Carolinas, emboldened by British promises of freedom, fled by the tens of thousands to take up arms in the king's forces. When the British evacuated New York in 1783, they took more than 3,000 with them. One, a Virginia freedman named Harry Washington, eventually settled in the African colony of Sierra Leone, where he built a plantation that he named Mount Vernon in honor of his former master.

According to most British writers, though, the biggest uncertainty of all was whether the United States -- a nation founded in the "criminal enterprise" of rebellion, as the English historian Edward Gibbon wrote in 1780 -- would ever be a worthy treaty partner for Britain and the other nations of Europe. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson promised that the former colonies would be good international citizens, yet the United States often seemed more like an international rogue. In the British press, two issues in particular stood out in this regard: the money that Americans had borrowed from British merchants before the revolution, and the property that state governments seized from Loyalist exiles after independence. To this day, estimates vary as to the sums involved. In Virginia alone, the prerevolutionary debt to British creditors was said to exceed £2 million, while the number of Loyalists who lost property and left the United States was at least 60,000 men, women, and children, and possibly more. Whatever the true figure, Congress lacked the authority under the Articles of Confederation, which served as the first federal constitution, to compensate the war's British victims, and the states refused to do so.

The Year In Unfreedom - An FP Slide Show

More than 1.6 billion people -- 23 percent of the world's population -- have no say in how they are governed and face severe consequences if they try to exercise their most basic rights. These include expressing their views, assembling peacefully, and organizing independently of the state. Sadly, the majority of these autocratic regimes are entrenched, enduring on average for 37 and a half years without any transfer of power between competing political parties or forces. Freedom House highlights these regimes in its annual Worst of the Worst report. This July 4th, here's a look at the countries with few freedoms to celebrate.

Above, Ugandan soldiers serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) 33rd Battalion are silhouetted against the skyline at sundown while atop a partially destroyed building in the Yaaqshiid District of Mogadishu on Nov. 22, 2011.

STUART PRICE/AFP/Getty Images

Is Nigeria the Next Front in the War on Terror? - By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

Violence between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria is drawing the country ever closer to a religious war. The instigator of this conflict is Boko Haram, an Islamist movement whose very name means "Western education is forbidden." If the Nigerian government can't stop this conflict from spiraling out of control, expect the United States to step in -- albeit with a relatively light hand -- to tip the scales against Boko Haram.

The situation in Nigeria hit a crisis point on June 17, when Boko Haram attacked three churches in Nigeria's north-central Kaduna state -- killing 21 people during services. Christians were quick to respond, and sectarian clashes ignited almost immediately. After four days of unrest, roughly 100 Nigerians lay dead.

Terrorist violence is nothing new for Boko Haram, a group that U.S. officials suspect of having links to al Qaeda. As the U.S. State Department has noted, attacks by Boko Haram and associated militants have taken more than 1,000 lives over the past 18 months. Nor is sectarian strife new to Nigeria: The country, predominantly Muslim in the north and Christian in the south, has a history of sectarian violence in its religiously mixed middle belt. Past riots killed more than 100 people in 2002 -- again in Kaduna -- when Muslim youths protested the Miss World pageant being held in Nigeria, and they also claimed scores of lives in 2006 following Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of controversial cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammed.

Recent events show that Boko Haram's attacks are only becoming more deadly. The organization is in the midst of a tactical evolution: Whereas Boko Haram used to employ such tactics as assassinations and massed assaults on security forces, suicide bombings now feature prominently in its arsenal, and Christian targets -- which are most frequently attacked while church services are ongoing -- have moved to the top of the group's target list.

The Nigerian government has had some successes. Boko Haram was the target of violent suppression in July 2009 when its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, was summarily executed by Nigerian security forces following his capture that month, and roughly 800 members of the sect were killed, according to Nigerian military estimates. As scholar David Cook's useful study on Boko Haram details, however, the group re-emerged with a vengeance the following year. It engaged in "a high profile campaign of assassinations and attacks throughout northern Nigeria," Cook writes, and began to employ suicide attacks in the summer of 2011. Further, Cook notes, Boko Haram's attacks and threats have focused "more and more on interests that touch U.S. economic concerns in the region."

In line with Boko Haram's tactical evolution, it has frequently employed suicide bombings in its onslaught against Christian targets. Prior to the June 17 attacks, Boko Haram had perpetrated a number of other terrorist assaults on church services. On April 29, gunmen attacked services on Bayero University in the northern state of Kano, killing at least 16 people. The group also took credit for a June 3 suicide attack on a church in northeastern Nigeria that killed 15 people and wounded 40 more. The following Sunday, June 10, two church attacks rocked the cities of Jos and Biu, killing three people and wounding over 40. Once again, Boko Haram claimed responsibility.

Such attacks have provoked a response from Nigeria's Christian community. Christian youths reportedly assaulted local Muslims around Jos in response to those attacks, but that retaliation paled in comparison to the wave of violence that followed the June 17 attacks. As Boko Haram's attacks on church services continued from one weekend to the next, Christian and Muslim leaders have tried to stop the religious violence from escalating. Jamaatu Nasril Islam, an umbrella group for Nigerian Muslim organizations, released an open letter to the government that condemned the church attacks, describing them as "barbaric."

The Return of the Mexican Dinosaur - By John M. Ackerman

Mexico has apparently decided to turn back the clock. Widespread frustration with 12 years of uneven political progress and stunted economic growth under the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) has driven part of the Mexican electorate to desperately call the old-guard Institutional Revolutionary (PRI) back to power. Meanwhile, in a repeat of the country's last presidential race in 2006, the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) has once again finished a close second.

According to the most recent LatinBarometer study, a whopping 73 percent of the Mexican population is dissatisfied with the performance of democracy (Mexico is tied with Guatemala for last place in Latin America in this category.) Such an attitude can be healthy for political development if it pushes citizens to work on improving the political system. But it can also produce a dangerous social malaise, which is the perfect breeding ground for the retrenchment of authoritarianism.

Last November, for instance, Guatemala voted in retired General Otto Pérez Molina as its new president in a worrisome embrace of the past. Pérez Molina has been implicated by civil society groups in systematic violations of human rights during the civil war that wreaked havoc in the country between 1960 and 1996. Activists have even filed a formal report with the U.N. special rapporteur on torture accusing Pérez Molina of war crimes for his direct role in the protracted conflict, which left more than 200,000 people dead and tens of thousands "disappeared."

Mexico has now followed Guatemala's lead. Instead of trying something new and joining the "pink tide" of progressive social democratic politics that has swept through Latin American in recent years, a plurality of Mexicans has apparently succumbed to frustration and turned back to the past.

One of the clearest messages from yesterday's election is that Mexicans are fed up with sitting President Felipe Calderón. They bitterly punished the PAN's candidate, Josefina Vázquez Mota, by relegating her to a distant third place with only 25 percent of the vote. This should come as no surprise after five years of non-stop violence, with more than 50,000 violent deaths due to the failed "drug war" during the Calderón administration alone.

The economy has also performed badly. Average annual per capita growth under the two PAN administrations since 2000 -- those of Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Calderón (2006-2012) -- has been about the same (0.9 percent) as it was during the last two decades of the previous PRI administrations (0.8 percent). Meanwhile, poverty and underemployment have significantly increased in recent years.

The surprise is not that Mexicans vote retrospectively, but that they somehow feel that the PRI can move them forward instead of backward. At 45, the PRI's Enrique Peña Nieto may have been the youngest candidate in the race, but there is no evidence that he actually represents something new. To the contrary, everything we know about him suggests that he will bring back the worst traditions of opacity, corruption, and intolerance. U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) may be right, for instance, in pointing out that a Peña Nieto victory could spell a "reversion to the PRI policies of old" based on "turning a blind eye to the [drug] cartels." Peña Nieto's public statements to the contrary in recent days are hardly believable.

Unipolar Disorder - By Michael A. Cohen

One of the more challenging aspects of writing a column about the politics of U.S. foreign policy is trying to fully understand the views of average voters on national security and foreign-policy issues. In this regard, Benjamin Valentino, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, has only made life more difficult. Last month he released a fascinating poll examining public attitudes on America's role in the world, the country's current alliance structure, and its foreign-policy preferences -- and it provided a somewhat schizophrenic and at times irreconcilable perspective on how Americans view the world and America's place in it. So rather than try to makes heads or tails of the results, I went to the source and sat down for an email interview with Valentino in which we discussed what he believes the poll tells us about current foreign-policy attitudes.

Foreign Policy: I'll start today with a rather broad question to get the conversation going: When I read through the poll results for the first time, I couldn't help but shake my head because for me the big takeaway is that voters have incoherent and often contradictory views about foreign policy and national security -- and I pity the policymaker who tries to glean from it what voters think about international issues (not to mention the political scientist)! For example, voters are generally supportive of the United States creating new alliances with states like Brazil and India and maintaining old ones -- while at the same time they think the U.S. can no longer afford its overseas commitments. Is there a consistent belief system in these results that I'm missing?

Benjamin Valentino: It's true that the poll results could be read as reflecting some kind of schizophrenia among the public. On the one hand, Americans showed little willingness to reconsider any of our major overseas commitments and even some readiness to establish new ones. On the other hand, although most of the public seems to recognize the increasing difficulty we face in paying for these commitments (more than 60 percent agreed that America "can no longer afford to maintain its commitments to defend all of its current allies around the world"), there was relatively little support for increasing taxes to help pay for them. Unfortunately, we get this kind of result all the time in public opinion polling. Americans want to have their cake and eat it too. I suspect that Republican respondents, who were the most supportive of expansive overseas commitments, would argue that we should pay for these policies through cuts in other government programs (just not Medicare or Social Security). Whether that is realistic or not, of course, is another question.

Still, my main takeaway from the survey is that the American public remains broadly supportive of the alliances and informal security commitments that America has today, even though many of them were forged over 60 years ago in a very different international environment. I saw very little evidence that the public would support a major retrenchment or Ron Paul-style foreign policy.

FP: This is one of the more interesting results from the poll: Republicans are broadly supportive of deficit reduction and yet strongly opposed to pretty much every possible solution for actually reducing the deficit -- military spending, cuts in Social Security or Medicare, and certainly not higher taxes. Along these lines, some of the results suggest a rather stark partisan divide. This shouldn't necessarily be that surprising -- one can imagine in a rather polarized political environment that Republicans would be more critical of current foreign policy and Dems more supportive. But on the big foreign-policy issues, do you detect a broad consensus of views? We hear a lot of talk about a bipartisan consensus in U.S. foreign policy; is there a bipartisan consensus among voters beyond the support for global commitments and alliances that you note above?

BV: Yes, given the strong anti-tax, anti-government spending mood in the Republican Party, I don't think we should be surprised at those answers. On that score, the results of this poll are broadly consistent with other recent polls on deficit reduction. Republicans want to decrease taxes and reduce the size of government, but it is difficult to get them to point to specific programs that they would agree to cut that could make a meaningful contribution to reducing the deficit. One of the few areas you can get Americans to agree on cutting back is, of course, is foreign aid, which accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending. If Americans knew that a large portion of our foreign aid goes to Israel, which our poll shows gets a lot of support from Americans, I'm not sure they would even favor that.

A Hollow Victory - By Adam Baron

For more photos of Al Qaeda in Yemen, click here. 

ADEN, Yemen ' "It's over: al Qaeda's leaving Zinjibar," the secessionist activist who had moonlighted as my driver in this southern Yemeni city announced.

My initial response, if I remember correctly, was a skeptical laugh. Since the militant group Ansar al-Sharia seized swaths of Yemen's Abyan province last year, government officials had often made overly confident claims about the progress of the battle to oust the al Qaeda-linked fighters. But as I'd personally confirm the next day, the militants' retreat was real. After more than a year, Yemeni forces had -- at least temporarily -- finally managed to regain control of the provincial capital.

Ansar al-Sharia began seizing towns in Abyan last spring, seemingly taking advantage of a growing power vacuum as the Yemeni government became consumed with a power struggle set off by nationwide anti-government protests targeting then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

At the time, many in Yemen characterized the group's rapid gains as the result of an intentional retreat by government forces, claiming that Saleh had deliberately abandoned the province -- long a hotbed of secessionist sentiment and Islamic militancy -- in a bid to divert attention from the demonstrations calling for his ouster.

And indeed, until the inauguration of Saleh's successor, longtime vice president Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the campaign to take back Abyan seemed sidelined by the tense standoff between pro-and anti-Saleh factions of the Yemeni military. But shortly after taking office, Hadi initiated a renewed offensive to expel the militants, who despite fighting under a different banner, are formally led by Nasser al-Wihayshi, leader of the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Backed by local fighters and U.S. intelligence and air support, the Yemeni armed forces gradually began to take back territory in the weeks before the so-called liberation of Zinjibar, even as I set off to Abyan the morning after government forces announced their victory, it was hard to shake my general sense of disbelief. Few journalists had ventured to Jaar and Zinjibar over the past year, and those who made it into Ansar al-Shariah-controlled areas brought back tales of the militants' seemingly unquestioned control.

As the desert gave way to the rural suburbs of Zinjibar, once a town of approximately 20,000, the nearly apocalyptic level of destruction jolted me into reality. On the front lines of what some military officials described as a year-long war of attrition between militants and Yemeni forces, nearly every building had been totaled. Graffiti blaming the destruction on the Yemen government's alliance with "American infidels" attested to the propaganda war, looming ominously over seemingly complacent farmers as they worked the fields surrounding the wreckage of their homes.

As we reached Zinjibar, checkpoints manned by the Yemeni military and its local tribal allies seemed to gesture at the government's intent to maintain their hold, though the handful of civilians milling around the city's bombed-out streets -- a miniscule percentage of the tens of thousands forced to flee the fighting -- largely seemed to be taking stock of their losses, even if many expressed a somewhat discordant sense of optimism.

Even the most upbeat civilians seemed almost taken aback by the devastation. It might have prevented militants from consolidating their hold on the city, but ultimately, the offensive had destroyed Zinjibar in the process of "saving" it. "Its great that they're gone," said Said Allawi, a Zinjibar resident, gesturing at the wreckage surrounding us. "But we're still left with the destruction they've left behind."

Some 10 miles north of Zinjibar in Jaar, another "liberated" town, Ansar al-Shariah had carved out a base, winning support -- or at the very least, compliance -- from the town's long-neglected inhabitants by providing security and basic services. But in their former bastion, once rechristened the "Islamic Emirate of Waqar," the militants were seemingly absent -- even if traces of their stay were omnipresent.

Under the nearly inescapable shadow of al Qaeda graffiti, my military escort undertook a paradoxical quest to find cold water, demonstrating the government's confidence in its control of the city while seeming strikingly disconnected from the already building angst of the sweltering town's inhabitants. Suffering from a seemingly indefinite power blackout, the responses of civilians ranged from perplexed to perturbed, signaling an apparent acceptance of the end of Ansar al-Sharia's rule paired with a deep skepticism that things would improve, in some cases, openly scoffing at my escort's assurances of the imminent return of government services.