Students of history might recall that the American revolution against Great Britain was touched off, at least in part, by the British Parliament's habit of imposing heavy taxes on colonial subjects, who were politically powerless, in lieu of taking the heat for levying heavier taxes on Britons themselves.

The "Boston Tea Party," in which American rebels, many of them disguised as Indians, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor on Dec. 16, 1773, and jettisoned more than 300 chests of tea, was a protest of what became known as "taxation without representation."

Ironically, however, once the American revolution had succeeded and the one-time rebels had become leaders of the United States of America, they did to politically marginal frontiersmen what the British had done to them. President George Washington and Congress imposed a heavy tax on the whiskey that was being produced in western Pennsylvania to pay for debts incurred during the Revolutionary War. The result was what became known as the Whiskey Rebellion, and Washington was forced to send troops to suppress the uprising.

One historian described the political rationale for the whiskey tax this way: "The combination of a (perceived) lack of political clout on the part of the Westerners, and the fact that Easterners would pay proportionally less due to their drinking habits and livelihood, made a whiskey tax seem ideal -- at least to the Easterners."

Imposing taxes on those deemed by politicians to be relatively powerless is an ancient, if dishonorable, practice, and one that California politicians have embraced ardently as they seek revenues that have minimal impact on the voting public.

The most blatant example of the syndrome in recent California history was the so-called "smog impact fee" that then-Gov. George Deukmejian and the Legislature enacted in July 1990 to balance the state budget. They decreed that every car re-registered in California from another state should be nailed with a $300 fee, an outrageous tax aimed at those thought to be politically impotent. It generated about a half-billion dollars by the time the courts, quite properly, declared it to be unconstitutional a decade later. The state was compelled to refund the money.

The philosophy of taxing those considered to be politically weak continues, however. The steady increase in taxes on cigarettes is a direct descendent on the whiskey taxes of 200-plus years ago. And the practice of taxing travelers through very steep local "occupancy taxes" on hotel and motel rooms and rental cars has become widespread. An interesting example of tax-the-outsider popped up during the final minutes of the state legislative session that ended early Saturday.

Rental car companies wanted the Legislature to allow them to impose on their customers a special surcharge that would cover 80 percent of the recent increase in vehicle license fees, rather than merely folding the increased tax into their overall rental rates. Having a separate surcharge would not affect basic rental rates, and rental firms could blame the state.

The Democratic legislative leadership, however, extracted a price for going along this expedient buck-passing: the imposition of an "impact fee" on rental car transactions, supposedly to offset the costs of building and maintaining roads on which rented cars travel. The 2.29 percent "impact fee" would raise more than $50 million a year, about the same as the 1990 "smog impact fee."

The simple fact is, of course, that rental cars have no more impact on roads than any other cars and already generate their share of license fees and gasoline taxes. So the underlying rationale for the new fee is just as phony as the "smog impact fee" that politicians imposed in 1990.

And, as one might suspect, the revenues from the new fee won't really go for highways; they're destined to replace highway money that the Legislature and the governor have diverted into the deficit-plagued general fund, protecting politicians from having to repay the highway money that they have ripped off.

The two new fees were muscled through in the final moments of the session, simply because rental car customers are not a powerful political bloc and many of them aren't even Californians. Some things never change.