Liberation Community
www.liberation.org Presents
An Answer to the Tea Party
From the Tea Party we hear "It's our money! We earned it
through our own hard work. The government should keep their hands off of our money. No taxes - we want to keep it."
We also hear "We're just like our nation's founding
fathers who held the original Boston Tea Party to protest taxes!"
Now let's get some perspective on these comments:
The notion that Tea Partiers earned all of their
money by themselves cleverly manages to sidestep
the obvious. Tea Partiers are unbelievably fortunate
to have been born in the United States of
America. Had they been born to a poor farming family
in Ethiopia or a family of goat hearders in
Afghanistan, they would be lucky to have not died in
infancy or early childhood as is common in so many countries,
and though they would work as hard or even harder than they
do now, the best rewards that they could hope for would
be to escape malnutrition and not have too many of thier
children die young.
Tea Partiers are enjoying
the blessings of having been born in the United States
which provides them with amazing opportunities to
succeed if they work hard. Our public education, roads,
infrastructure, police and emergency services
that make our way of life in America possible are provided by
taxes. For Tea Partiers to suggest that they owe
nothing back for all of the opportunities that have been
given to them by virtue of the luck of having
been born in the United States is greedy, selfish and
short-sighted in the extreme.
It seems as though Tea Partiers who have enjoyed the
blessings of being born in the United States would now
like to deny those benefits to future generations of
Americans by not supporting and starving a government
that has given them so very much. Some wealthy Americans
have even said
that they would like to be able to drown the United States
government in a bathtub. How patriotic is that?
The idea that Tea Partiers are doing the sort of thing
that the Founding Fathers did conveniently ignores the facts
of history.
When the Founding Fathers held the Boston Tea Party we were
a colony of the British Crown. Taxes raised in colonies were
not raised for the benefit of the colonists. Colonists were
taxed as a means of extracting wealth from the colonies in order
to enrich the Crown. Virtually none of that extracted
wealth would then be used for the benefit of the colonies.
Colonists had no vote or say in how the affairs of British
government were conducted. Thus did our founding fathers
protest "Taxation without Representation." Their
main complaint wasn't that they were being taxed, it was that they
had no standing or representation in the government.
Tea Partiers today have a vote, and they may not care for
the winners of the election, but that does not mean that the winners
do not represent them.
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