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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Myron Magnet</title>
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		<title>Bracing Brew</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/myron-magnet/bracing-brew/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bracing-brew</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 04:00:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Myron Magnet]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=56392</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Bring on the tea parties!]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/teaparty.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56397" title="teaparty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/teaparty.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="299" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a></strong>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>In what other country could a TV reporter, without missing a beat, invoke his  nation’s founding ideas—and on top of that, give rise almost instantly to  hundreds of Tea Party groups with tens of thousands of members grounding their  opposition to President Obama’s redistributionist program on a similar appeal to  the Founders? The signs at their rallies echo Madison’s contempt for such  “improper or wicked project[s]” as “an abolition of debts” or “an equal division  of property.” BORN FREE, TAXED TO DEATH, read one  poster at a Wyoming Tea Party, while another proclaimed, OBAMA AKA ROBBIN’ HOOD WANTS TO STEAL FROM THOSE WHO WORK TO GIVE  HANDOUTS TO THOSE WHO WON’T. In Georgia, a Tea Partier flourished a  placard that read FREE MARKETS, NOT FREE LOADERS.  And everywhere appeared signs saying HONOR THE  CONSTITUTION or WE ARE ENDOWED BY OUR CREATOR WITH  CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS.</p>
<p>What unifies the many Tea Partiers interviewed on the Pajamas TV  website—mostly middle-class, conservative whites, often over 60, with a strong  sprinkling of military veterans, small-business owners, independent voters, and  young people among them—is their fear that the president’s various Great  Recession bailouts, along with his government takeover of health care, will  change America from the limited-government, individualistic, free-enterprise  regime that the Founders created to a statist, big-government regime that will  curb liberty in the name of redistributionist “fairness” and will burden their  children and grandchildren with impoverishing public debt. “Every step the  government takes, takes us further away from the Constitution and towards big  government,” said a young Marine vet at a Florida Tea Party. “We want the  government just to leave us alone, let us live our own lives,” said a Texas Tea  Partier before government-controlled health care passed. “I’ve got three  businesses, two of them barely hanging on because of all this crap. Got one  doing well because it’s local. If they pass health care, you can write off four  more unemployed people, because I won’t be able to pay them. You can’t keep  taking our rights away.”</p>
<p>Summing up a universal Tea Party sentiment, Freerepublic.com founder Jim  Robinson said at a Georgia rally, “I would like to see this country go back to  the Constitution—get rid of all this socialism.” Mainstream journalists have  pounced on this idea. What big-government programs would you like to get rid of?  interviewer Charlie Rose demanded of former House majority leader Dick Armey, a  Tea Party ally. Medicare? Social Security? Gotcha! The <em>New York Times</em> triumphantly quoted the discomfited ambivalence of 30-year-old Keli Carender,  organizer of the first Tea Party, about Medicare and Medicaid. “Some days I’m  very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs,” she said.  “Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should  be no federal part in it at all.” But these journalists don’t understand that to  the Tea Partiers, saying that we’ve already replaced the Founders’ limited  government with a medium-sized welfare state is no argument for scaling it up to  a European-sized one. As one sign asked of health-care nationalizer Obama at a  Wyoming Tea Party, MEDICARE IS GOING BROKE, MEDICAID IS  GOING BROKE, AND YOU WANT US TO BELIEVE <strong>WHAT?</strong></p>
<p>Like any grassroots revolt, starting with the colonial committees of  correspondence, the Tea Party movement begins with a resounding No! As one sign  commenting on the president’s health-care takeover phrased it, RAM IT DOWN OUR THROATS, AND WE’LL SHOVE IT UP YOUR—and  here followed a picture of a bucking Democratic donkey. And the <em>No!</em> is  remarkably sweeping. Spluttered a well-coiffed, well-mannered lady of retirement  age in Texas, “We have been very angry—I love President Bush, but he kept  spending money, money, money.” Passionate, fast-expanding, and armed with all  the latest electronic technology that Obama deployed so brilliantly in his  campaign—Facebook, Twitter, Meetup.com, and so on—the Tea Partiers will surely  influence candidate selections and electoral races this year and in 2012. The  question is, how fully will they embrace the radicalism of their own radically  American creed?</p>
<p><strong><em>Myron Magnet is </em>City Journal<em>’s editor-at-large and was its editor  from 1994 through 2006. He is the author of </em>The Dream and the Nightmare: The  Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass<em> and a recipient of the National Humanities  Medal.</em></strong></p>
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