By Jeanne Ives -
In the lead up to the Declaration of Independence, the colonists used a series of boycotts to protest the British Coercive Acts which were the British response to the Boston Tea Party.
Also known as the Intolerable Acts, these acts annulled Massachusett’s charter, forced colonists to quarter British soldiers, closed the Boston harbor, and moved trials for capital crimes outside the jurisdiction they were committed in.
It wasn’t the first time the colonists had used boycott’s to rebel against British actions. Just a few years earlier the colonists boycotted the Townsend levies on imported glass, paint, lead, paper, and tea. Before both of those acts, the British passed the Sugar Act, Currency Act, Quartering Act, and Stamp Act, all of them ineffective and ignored by colonists that refused to be abide them and who were opposed to “taxation without representation"
Fast forward to 2019, Illinoisans are using the same tactic as our founding fathers and boycotting the doubling of our gas tax. Numerous news outlets have reported on Illinoisan plated vehicles filling up across state lines to save $3, $4, $5 or more on gas. In some cases, people are driving an extra 20 minutes to do so. At that point, it isn’t for the savings, it is to simply deprive the predatory state government from any extra tax. It is an intentional citizen protest. And when they go to fill-up across the border, they are also shopping for other items and denying additional sales taxes to the state of Illinois. I applaud them and so would our founding fathers.
The legislature and Governor Pritzker took a sledge hammer to our economy last session. The bi-partisan combine passed the largest budget in state history despite record out-migration. Your political leaders did nothing to control spending or halt the continued growth in pensions at the state and local level. And after all of the spending they piled on more by passing a massive capital bill loaded up with pork projects, handing out more of your money for special projects that only legislators got to decide on. Democrats intentionally got twice as much money as Republicans. Our founding fathers would be appalled.
Meanwhile, on this Independence Day, Illinoisans are enslaved to $400 billion in debt and no way to pay it off. The $45 billion in new capital spending will add more debt to our state for generations to come.
So take action. By all means protest and boycott as patriots did in the lead up to July 4, 1776. Then, next year take the revolution to the voting booth. As Don Willet remarked in a Wall Street Journal commentary last September, “Citizenship is not a spectator sport.”
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We live in the greatest country in the world. We must never forget the battles fought over the revolutionary concept that our rights as persons do not derive from a monarch, a clergyman, a dictator or any other ruler. Our rights are inherent in our very being. We are endowed with natural rights given to us by God. It is over this concept, and its corollary that natural rights can only be preserved by a people that are self-governed, that our founding fathers fought the American Revolutionary War.
It is now our job to preserve our nation for generations to come. A good old fashioned boycott may just be the first step to a tax revolt in Illinois.
