The only sources of tea in Europe and America were the British and the Dutch East India Companies. The smugglers were bringing tea from Holland that had been imported there by the Dutch East India Company. They controlled the markets in NY and Philly, while the market was split in Boston. The British changed their tea taxation to refund to the British East India Company a major tax on any tea shipped out of Britain to America, to make it competitive with Dutch tea, which had no such tax. Competition is good, right? Lowers prices?
At that point those involved in the Dutch tea trade in Boston, seeing British tea arrive slightly cheaper, took action to block the competition — intimidating their independent salesmen who were expecting the shipments with such severe threats that most of them quit, and finally boarding the ships to destroy property. Decades later this got written up as the "heroic" Tea Party. And it is true that at the time Sam Adams claimed that the cause of action was a remaining, much smaller, tax on the British tea — despite that that tax left British tea cheaper than the Dutch tea. But the obvious cause of the riot was a desire not to have a competitor offer lower prices. It was an effort at strong-arm enforcement of a Dutch monopoly, which
already prevailed in NY and Philly.
The chartering of the Dutch and British East India Companies, both private corporations, was done in order to have Far East trade exist at all. It was tremendously expensive and risky. And as far as I'm aware, there was no clamoring either in Britain nor the Netherlands for more than one such enterprise per nation. Mounting even one successfully was a huge operation. Think moon landing — except in this case something on the same scale accomplished by private corporations, better than a government agency, right?
Similarly the first corporations in America were chartered to build private turnpikes. They were given monopolies for turnpikes in their regions due to the excessive cost of building them, so that they had good enough assurance of return to raise private capital. It worked. There are still parts of those private turnpikes here in New England — although no longer private.
In any case the original Tea Party "patriots" were thugs serving the monopoly interest of a corporation, the Dutch East India Company. They took their decisive action right after taxes were lowered, not raised, to prevent competition at a lower price point. Most colonists at the time were appalled they'd destroyed private property. It was only a later generation that repainted them as Revolutionary heroes.