The tea party crowd.

• Position: Letters to the Editor - Letter to the editor

We all understand that today's Americans have little concept of our history. The conservative tea party crowd illustrates the point ("Taking Tea Partiers Seriously," by Chip Berlet, February issue).

Thing are not what they seem. The Colonials were bothered by a steep tax on tea.

Being innovators, they solved their problem by smuggling, selling tea at a good price, but undercutting the English tea monopoly.

Mad King George, perhaps no madder than most English monarchs, agreed to placate his colonial subjects and removed the taxes on tea.

This, of course, meant the demise of a very profitable colonial business, tea smuggling, clearly bad for job creation. The Boston Tea Party dumped the first shipment of untaxed tea into the harbor showing just what happens when taxes go down. So, the Boston Tea Party was an event that should be celebrated as a citizen revolt over lowering taxes, perhaps suggesting that our colonial tea party forebears had quite different ideas than our tea party contemporaries.

Nick Vanderborgh

Boulder, Colorado

I have several "tea bagger" friends, and they are funny. They are against big government but support the creation of the Homeland Security Department and the Transportation Security Administration for $62 billion annually.

They are against deficit spending but support the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, projected to...