Tax Day TEA Parties
Originally Printed April 25, 2009. Reposted for archival purposes… It is quite amazing how transparent the TEA Party was even back then. Some of us could see right through them.
First, a link:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/14/tea-party-protestors-gird-possible-backlash/
Note the address of this citation. Fox News. You got it. There’s lots of sympathetic blogs out there to this movement as well, but as I tend to not cite blogs unless they are mine, because most blogs are entirely composed of illegitimate drivel passed off as publish-worthy journalism, I opted not to cite them. You can google them if you really want to make yourself more ignorant.
But Fox News, despite their political bias, are a fairly reliable resource of general consensus on the right. Ad another place THEY cite is http://taxdayteaparty.com/ just in case you decided to look a little further into this activity. The FNC report is mostly a commentary on alleged attempts by ACORN to organize counter-protests to the Tea Parties.
For those of you who don’t know, (and I was just made aware of this this morning, that is, what this thing is) some right wing conservatives have decided that they should make an allusion to a seminal even in our nation’s history, that being the Boston Tea Party, and hold open protests to display their discontent with the tax proposals of the Obama Administration.
Now as far as I can tell, these people are protesting taxes in general, as well as the entitlement programs they fund. The FNC link sheds no light on what these people are protesting. For that we turn to USA Today, linked at http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-04-12-teaparties12_N.htm . Turns out, what we got on our hands is a good old fashioned tax revolt. Apparently people are tired of taxes going for things they don’t believe in, like bailing out banks… and government stimulus… and a whole raft of other things. Says the USA Today Source: “The goal is to pressure Congress and states to reject government spending as a way out of the recession and build an anti-spending coalition around regular taxpayers.” These are the words of the article’s author, Oren Dorell, who works for USA Today. I would also note that this article is NOT an editorial.
Returning to the FNC site as well as the main organizing site, there have been reports that People who oppose the tax protests, the protestors of the protestors, if you will, are trying to paint the protests as racist and fringist. It is important to note this, because sympathizers already feel themselves as defenders of the public purse, and they anticipate being further attacked, apparently unjustly, by fringe leftist groups. From Fox News, quoting one tea Party organizer, Mark Mekler, about the justness of the cause: “But the reality is this is a very broad-based grassroots movement…” The code words are telling: What he means to say is that his movement represents the majority of the people who have not stood up until now to say enough. The movement encompasses left, right, center, fringe moderate, etc, portions of society who have been waiting for the chance to speak out about this.
I have spent my time so far reporting what rightist sources said about these protests. I won’t spend too much time saying what leftists say. You can google that as well, and I am under no equal time obligation. As a summary, the left says basically that we need the Obama budget to grow the economy (this is from the Pelosi spokesman quoted in the USA Today Article), and therefore those protesting it must be anti-economic recovery. From the same article, Moveon.org dismissed the protests because apparently Moveon.org usually mobilizes a lot more participants using the internet than this movement has.
Whatever.
Look, the facts are clear to anyone who spends just a couple minutes thinking about this, which I have (having not known ANYTHING about what these people are protesting until I got to the store immediately before coming home to write this note.) This protest is based on the ideological opposition to taxes [and more importantly, using those taxes to fund programs for people who “I” either think are undeserving, criminal minded, or just plain “not me”.] The bailout and stimulus were just the excuse to launch a new tax protest by the right. The only supporters of this movement are conservative Republicans and the “moderates” on the right and left who are actually in the wrong place politically, and belong with the conservatives. It is no more broad based than big-government socialism is. But you see, they are being sneaky and not admitting that. So let me take a second to expose it all for what it is.
I’d like to momentarily interrupt and say I am not talking about racism here. Conservatism is not a racist ideology, per se. Some forms of the extreme versions of it are racist, but they are not racist because they are conservative, they are reactionary because they are racist. The arguments of those who will try to paint these protests as racist are therefore incorrect. The coincidence of conservatism and anti-tax ideology does not lie along race lines but poverty lines. Conservatives are ideologically anti-poor, not anti-minority. They may appear racist because it so happens that our society is set up so that the poor are also largely minorities.
Why do conservatives hate taxes? Well, they are inherently liberal in this sense: The government which governs best governs least. This is the ideological end of conservatism: Absolute freedom to make as much money as you can, acquire as much property as you can, and let the free market offer commodities which can be purchased with that money without any interference by the government. This is actually a very “liberty promoting scheme”: More choice, freer choice equals greater freedom, and if we have the freedom to decide our own conditions of work, our own conditions of consumption, and our own conditions of life, we will be absolutely free. We need more free choices, not less. Government constrains that sort of freedom by its design: The purpose of government is to protect life, liberty, and property, and where it oversteps that role, it enters into the role of the tyrant. Therefore, personal welfare is tyranny, and the people who participate in the individual welfare system are slaves to the government. The conservatives want to free these people from their slavery, to “force them to be free” if you will. Work, acquisition of wealth and participation in materialism in a free market is what makes a person free, and if a person opts not to follow this path they are dragging the rest of society down. Conservatives are willing to pay taxes to pay for police and the military (though the true conservative supports at most a skeleton force able to defend our shores.) but beyond that, appropriation of individual wealth by the government is thievery.
I challenge a conservative to tell me how my analysis of conservatism is incorrect or unfair.
And yet, though I can see what they are saying, their conception is based on a flawed entry premise, and that is liberalism. The one thing that liberalism neglects to mention is that when people live in society they enjoy public goods. A public good is defined as something given to society which you cannot deny any member, even though someone may not pay for that good. Roads and the military are two of these public goods. If I make no money, and pay no taxes, I still enjoy roads and the benefits of the military. I also still have the opportunity to send my kids to get educated, and inoculated. I enjoy the benefits of public parks and public order, even though I never paid a cent for them. My use of these goods without my paying for them shifts the burden of my share of the costs onto others who do pay for them.
The anti-tax people, however, seem to believe either that we live in a paradise where these things should be provided for by money that simply materializes out of thin air, or they think that they should not have to pay for services that they don’t want. They dream of themselves as living on an island, surrounded by a fortress which they man themselves, to protect their little good life within the walls from the starving and lazy masses, who are starving because they are lazy. If they like social services, they apparently don’t think anyone has to pay for them, and if they resent them, they think they are being robbed to pay for someone else.
They neglect to take into consideration that even if there was no tax, they still live in a society, and benefit from being able to interact with others. If they truly were an island, and were even cut off from the most basic element of common society, that being a common language, they would no more be able to organize the defense of their little plot of territory, or collection of their own food, than a baby is. In fact, we do not live in a mutually unintelligible state of nature, nor is that preferable, as the conservatives would like to claim. We benefit in a billion ways from society that we all take for granted every single day.
Is it not right then that there should be a price for those benefits? I wouldn’t say that conservatives are thieves: That is, I don’t believe that they are ideologically committed to freeloading. But none of them are willing to admit that the price of living in society is mutual support of your neighbor. You have to contribute to his defense just like you need him to do for you. You have to contribute to the growing of food for all, or else you will be stuck in perpetual famine yourself. This is the price of society, and if you opt to not pay that price when you can, you are a freeloader (the poli sci term is free rider, but I want to put a negative connotation on that neutral term.) You are not any better than a common thief, but worse, because you are stealing from MANY people, and not just one.
The price of living in this society is steep. The people of this society demand lots of government services, despite the cry of outrage by those indeed VERY few who don’t think they should. Our citizens want good roads, safe streets, cheap education, public health, and also a stupid misguided war against “terrorism” overseas (yeah, even conservatives support that one). The conservative position is the minority one. Since conservatives tend to not be thieves, and pay for the things they get, if they are interested in being ideologically consistent, they begrudgingly pay their taxes for these things.
But when it comes to welfare and public education, conservatives [and many liberals, it turns out] hate these programs. They would prefer to send their kids to private school so their kids don’t have to mix with the poor, lest some of the mental diseases of the poor afflict their children. Think this is too far fetched? Conservatives think the poor are poor because they are lazy. It is true that the poor pay far less in taxes than the rich, and take the lion’s share of welfare benefits (because these programs are designed so only the poor can access them). The conservatives think, therefore, of welfare recipients as free-riders, and by my definition above, they would be wrong. Welfare is not in the strictest sense a “public good” because it is not designed to benefit everyone, and cannot by design exclude people who do not pay into it. They would be more accurate to refer to individual welfare (and some do) as wealth redistribution. And conservatives, I believe to the person are opposed to this. Hence their anti-tax stance. They don’t think they should have to pay their hard earned wealth into a system that is just going to hand it over to a bunch of lazy whiners who do not contribute anything to society, and only take take take.
I think I nailed that on the head. Conservatives are opposed to taxes because taxes fund programs that they don’t support. There is no other reason. We can dispense with the whole notion of justice in the system. It is crass interest. For the conservative, the poor have the kind of life they secretly wish they could have: which is to get money for apparently doing nothing.
But ask yourself: Is it better to live in a society with food stamps or a society with people dying of hunger in the streets? We all know that poverty breeds crime, so wouldn’t it be more intelligent to eliminate poverty to wipe out crimes of necessity? We all know that the type of medical system we have today systematically excludes certain classes of people from life saving treatment, so wouldn’t it be better to guarantee preventative health service to people so they didn’t have to clog ER’s with treatable illnesses?
The conservative will answer no it is not. “If I can take care of myself and my family, that’s all I care about. I shouldn’t have to pay for the support of others.” So the anti-tax position is also inherently selfish, and ignores the fact that the only reason the rich can enjoy their lives the way they do is because billions of people’s hard work goes into making cheap consumer goods for them to enjoy. The conservatives want to get paid for doing nothing, and barring that, they seek to deny that same opportunity to others, even others who are systematically barred from living like they do. They oppose the progressive income tax because it takes from them and doesn’t take as much from the people they hate, that being the lazy poor. They oppose property taxes, because they are the primary property owners. They oppose estate tax, because they believe that they should be able to pass unlimited wealth to their children.
In fact, they oppose all taxes because they oppose the programs that taxes go to pay for. And the best way to kill a program is to underfund it.
This is why people are protesting taxes today. “Taxation without moderation” is just stupid rhetoric that hearkens back to a day when people were basically protesting the same things that the modern conservatives are also protesting: “We don’t think we should have to pay for services we don’t want.” And yet these same assholes seem to think it is imperative that I pay taxes which support the Iraq War. How ironic.
