EDITORIAL: Bracing Brew- Bring on the Tea Parties!
by Myron Magnet (excerpt)

CITY JOURNAL

The Tea Party movement is a healthy reminder that the United States began as a tax revolt. From the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, when the American colonists first called their representatives together to declare their “undoubted right . . . that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent,” to the Boston Tea Party eight years later, when the Sons of Liberty dumped a shipload of tea into the harbor rather than accept Britain’s right to tax that normally soothing commodity, the Founding Fathers militantly denied that “all the fruits of [the colonists’] labour and industry may be taken from [them] whenever an avaricious governor and a rapacious council may incline to demand them,” as future chief justice John Jay put it in 1775. After all, they reasoned as they took up arms against their king, government exists to protect “certain inherent rights, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” as George Mason summed up Lockean orthodoxy in Virginia’s Bill of Rights. Therefore, when a government invades rather than safeguards property through taxation without consent, it cancels its own legitimacy.

The Founders had no quarrel with citizen-sanctioned taxation, but in shaping their new government they never forgot, as future president James Madison wrote, that “the apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality, yet there is perhaps no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice.” To forestall that danger—specifically, the danger that the propertyless majority would tyranically tax away the property of the minority—they constructed their beautiful governmental framework of limited and enumerated powers, with its checks and balances for extra restraint. Madison and his fellow Founders understood, long before Lord Acton, that “all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree”—and nowhere more so than in the matter of taxes.

So it was exhilarating to hear CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli invoke these great doings of two centuries ago in his famous February 2009 outburst that gave birth to the Tea Party movement. Two days earlier, newly inaugurated president Barack Obama had signed his $787 billion stimulus act, which taxpayers ultimately must finance, and which went in part to keep bloated state and local governments from having to fire the unnecessary “swarms of officers” that “harass our people, and eat out their substance,” as the Declaration of Independence described King George’s tax-financed colonial officials. The next day, Obama had proposed a $75 billion mortgage-modification program to save sinking borrowers from foreclosure. Why doesn’t the president have a referendum “to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?” Santelli demanded. Turning to the commodity traders behind him at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he asked, “How many of you people want to pay your neighbor’s mortgage, that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Discomfited by the roar of anti-bailout booing from the floor, Santelli’s New York anchorman warily observed, “These people are like putty in your hands.”

“No, they’re not,” Santelli countered. “This is America. Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective; now they’re driving ’54 Chevys—maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit. We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. I’m going to start organizing. If you look at our Founding Fathers, like Franklin and Jefferson—what we’re doing right now is making them roll over in their graves.”