In 1773 a mob of American colonists famously dumped crates of tea belonging to the British East India Company into Boston harbor. It was a direct action by citizens against the tax regime of the British government, and just one of several incidents that ultimately led to the Revolutionary War.

More than two-hundred years later Americans still notoriously abominate taxes. They hate taxes so much that they deny themselves a privilege taken for granted by every other civilized nation on earth, namely, universal healthcare.

So how can they just sit quietly by as the greatest tax rip-off of all time is inflicted on them?

The $700,000,000,000 bailout package approved by the senate yesterday will place a tax burden of several thousand dollars on every man, woman, and child in the U.S. and that’s on top of the huge debt they already bear. It is a burden that exceeds by an order of magnitude the burden that the British tried to place on the American colonists after the Seven Year’s War. More significantly, it is the result not of justifiable expenditure, but of corruption at the highest levels.

Yet all is quiet. No protests in the streets, no angry mobs, no latter-day Boston Tea Partiers tarring and feathering the crooked politicians and bankers who made it all possible.

Exactly what do you have to do to people in the twenty-first century to provoke direct action?