Tea Party, Anyone?

It started in 1773, when a group of 200 American colonists, disguised as American Indians, tossed the cargo of tea from each of three British ships in the Boston Harbor to protest Parliament's imposition of direct taxes on the colonists, including on tea, to repay debt borrowed to fund the French and Indian Wars.

Fast forward to February 27, 2009, when 15,000 American attended the Chicago Tea Party and similar events in other American cities to protest the Obama-Bush-Democrat massive spending policies under which we're now suffering, which, if not stopped, will double the federal debt to about $20 trillion in the next few years. The success of the Chicago Tea Party inspired grass roots organizers to organize a bigger protest with more people in more cities on April 15, 2009, a mere 9 days from now as I write. You can learn more about the coming Tea Party at http://www.surgeusa.org/actions/taxday.htm. Michelle Malkin, the beautiful, conservative, oriental columnist and pundit (i.e., talking head) has signed on as a sponsor (http://www.michellemalkin.com/), has Newt Gingrich's American Solutions (http://americansolutions.com/teaparty). Sean Hannity of Fox News plans to do his April 15 show from the Atlanta Tea Party. People in the DC metro area plan a large Tea Party across the street from the White House. Facebook has a Tax Tea Party group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=55223597239&ref=ts), and between it and the Surgeusa.com website, it looks like we could have at least one Tax Day Tea Party in every one of the 50 states, and several in some states. (For an enthusiastic endorsement of the Tax Day Tea Party, please see my buddy Don's blog at http://donliberty1787.blogspot.com/2009/04/join-tea-party-movement.html.)

Joining the Tax Day Tea Party is fun, and I signed up too, but will it have an actual political impact? Of that I'm not sure. Even the large conservative resurgences during my lifetime have had relatively minor impacts, mostly serving just to slow the growth of Big Government. The Reagan resurgence did win the Cold War, so that had a lasting impact, but is the world safer now than during the days when the Soviets held the leashes of most of the world's terrorists? I warned people back when the USSR collapsed that the collapse of the Soviet Union wasn't 1) the "end of history" as the liberal media was proclaiming, 2) the "end of socialism" as the liberal media were also proclaiming, or 3) the beginning of a safer world.

I will also give the Reagan conservative resurgence credit for deregulating the price of domestic oil and gas, so that we never had a repeat of the gas station lines of the 1970s, and for indexing the federal income tax system, especially using the CPI, which overstates inflation, giving us each a tiny little tax cut each year. (The same political forces that led Congress to start deregulating oil and gas prices under Jimmy Carter led to the election of Ronald Reagan, who completed the deregulation of oil and gas prices.)

How about the Newt resurgence? He did manage to de-entitle some of the smaller entitlement programs, and at least start a phase-out of grain price subsidies. On the whole though I'd have to say that the Newt resurgence had even less long-term consequence even domestically than did the Reagan resurgence. So what will the Tax Day Tea Party achieve? If I had to bet real money--if I had any after the federal and state governments steal 28% of my income this year (not the marginal rate but the average rate for the year)--I'd bet that it will have no lasting impact. Alas I'm not even sure it will even have any short-term impact on taxes or spending.

In a recent email a friend of mine said that 98% of Americans support socialism. I don't know that it's 98%, and keep in mind that a large minority of eligible adults don't even vote, but I do suspect that a majority of adult Americans support some socialism or other. They do not all support systematic socialism (although pretty much everyone on the left does) but rather targeted socialism.

Some support socialism targeted to line their own pockets, such as the "conservative" Iowa farmers who think they have a divine right to grain price supports, or the mushy moderate chamber of commerce types who whine about paying taxes for welfare but have no trouble imposing local taxes to pay for bike trails for their kids or libraries that have their names up in neon lights.

Others support socialism targeted to benefit someone else whom they think has gotten or still has a raw deal, like many Jewish liberals who don't want social programs for themselves, but rather for poor blacks or other minorities whom the Jewish liberals believe have gotten a raw deal and therefore cannot succeed on their own (unlike Jews who got a raw deal but somehow managed to succeed on their own!).

Keep in mind too that people get addicted to the status quo, so if they're getting social welfare benefits, they don't want to lose them. That means that virtually every elderly person in the country supports the Social Security system, which is why even Reagan could make no headway with de-socializing the SS system. (W. Bush campaigned on a partial-privatization of SS, but then let it die on the vine in Congress without giving it any support. Liberals then used the collapse of the stock market bubble caused by liberal inflationary policy at the Federal Reserve System as "proof" that SS privatization would have been a bad idea, even though if you had been investing your SS tax in stocks for the last half century, you'd still be vastly better off than you are with your meager SS payments.)

With people who don't support systematic socialism, it's possible to persuade them to abandon at least pieces of the socialism they do like in favor of freer markets and better protection for their property rights. It's certainly possible to make reduce socialistic policy at the margin. That's a big part of why I wrote columns in Iowa and blog now.

And if the Tax Day Tea Party isn't just going to be a fun event where people vent their frustrations with Big Government, a lot of people are going to have to be willing to give up some of their targeted socialist policies.