Editor's Note: On Thursday, I posted the prepared text of a relatively short speech I gave at the Tax Day Tea Party in Charlottesville, Virginia. The text of that speech also went up at RealClearPolitics on Friday. Below is the text of a longer speech that I gave to a slightly smaller but very dedicated audience of tea partiers at a later part of the same event. Readers may recognize this as a greatly expanded version of an article published in TIA Daily on February 9.—RWT
For those who caught my remarks at the beginning of today's rally, I mentioned the left's attempt to reverse the ideas at the base of America, and their contemptuous indifference to this country's real history. I mentioned an article that was published on Monday in the Boston Globe that argued for the "patriotism" of paying the outrageous tax rates that we now have to pay. I'll have a little bit more to say about that article in a moment, but one of the astounding claims it makes is that it is a "myth…that America was born in rebellion against taxes." Oh, really?
Let's take a look at the Declaration of Independence. I was at the July 4 Tea Party in Charlottesville last year, and one of the things that I really liked is that Joe Thomas began the event simply by reading the Declaration of Independence, and when you read through it like that, you notice a lot of things that people don't tend to pay enough attention to. People tend to remember the philosophical part at the beginning, about individual rights and the consent of the governed, which was the theory behind the American Revolution. And I wish a lot more people would read that part and take it seriously. But we tend to skip the middle section, which is the list of grievances that the American colonists had against King George III and the British Parliament.
Unfortunately, that list is still relevant and timely today. For example, take this issue of taxes. One of our Founding Fathers' chief complaints against King George was that "He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance." Sound familiar?
As the old saying goes, taxation without representation is slavery—but taxation with representation isn't that great, either. And so we find that we don't need a swarm of officer to come all the way across the Atlantic to eat out our substance. We can summon our own army of domestic parasites.
That is the unique achievement of the current administration. Barack Obama has presided over an economic boom and a rising tide of prosperity—if you work for the government.
Recently the news came out that, for the first time in America's history, the number of government employees exceeded the number of employees in "goods producing industries." Now I want to point out that "goods producing industries" is a very broad category. It includes things like logging and mining and agriculture, and not just manufacturing. The number of government employees has already exceeded the number of employees in manufacturing, long ago. Does anyone know when that happened? According to my research, it happened back in 1990.
So the number of people who make things are now exceeded by the number of government bureaucrats whose job is to prevent things from being made. And some of these government jobs are pretty plush: another report revealed recently that while the rest of us were in a recession, the number of government jobs paying more than $100,000 per year increased by almost 50%. Government jobs paying more than $150,000 more than doubled.
It used to be that if you worked for the government, there was a tradeoff: you got better benefits, but the pay was lower. Not any more. Another recent study concluded that government jobs pay much more on average than the private sector. And you also get job security. The federal government is hiring, but what about the state governments? They can't take on trillion dollar deficits because they can't print money like the federal government can. Yet on the state level, there has been no decrease in government jobs during downturn, while overall unemployment is 10%. So if you're in the private sector, there's a significant chance you lost your job in the last year. If you're in the government, you're safe. Oh yes, and when they shoved through the health care bill, the Democrats also sneaked in a federal takeover of student loans, which includes a provision that makes your student loans go away after ten years—again, if you work for the government.
This will give you an idea of some of the outrage that's fueling the tea party movement. When I asked a local tea party organizer what got her started, one of the first things she mentioned was the contrast between what ordinary people were doing with their own budgets—cutting back, giving up on luxuries, trying to dig themselves out of debt—and what the federal government was doing: a spending binge financed by vast new quantities of debt that we will have to pay. People are outraged, and they are terrified of a future in which America's only growth industry is government.
But of course, it's not an industry, not really, because it doesn't actually produce anything. At best, this swarm of officers manages wasteful public works boondoggles and outrageously subsidized "green jobs" projects. At worst, their job is to impose stultifying new regulations and collect taxes that drain more wealth from the private economy. The IRS has been hiring like mad, and Obamacare gives them new enforcement responsibilities that will require them to hire thousands more agents. President Obama's latest budget provided an extra $400 million to increase the agency's tax enforcement—that is, to "harass our people and eat out their substance."
The most ominous part of this trend is the runaway growth of public employees' unions, which are now bigger than private-sector unions. Thanks to their ability to shake down the taxpayers, these unions can offer what has been described as "lifetime job security and benefits."
The whole concept of a public employees' union—an organization dedicated to draining the wealth of the American taxpayer—is repugnant. It should probably be illegal. But such unions are now a major pillar of political support for the Democratic Party and for the current administration. And they are the symbol of its policies. This is the Obama administration's economic "stimulus" in action—a stimulus for the parasites at the expense of the producers. It's a stimulus of non-productive, non-profit-making activity. It is an attempt to transform our country into a society in which a growing class of government-connected insiders enjoys the privilege of living off of everyone else's efforts.
The New York Times just put out an analysis of a survey on the tea party movement. I love it when the mainstream media does surveys like this, because the results are usually a mix of the totally obvious and the totally wrong.
For example, they found out that "while most Republicans say they are 'dissatisfied' with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as 'angry.'" I hope they didn't pay too much money to find that out.
Now for the totally wrong part. When I got an e-mail alert about this article, the headline read, "Poll Finds Tea Party Anger Rooted in Issues of Class." Issues of class? What does that mean? The article says that we're motivated by "the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich." Yeah, we're concerned that the government hasn't done enough to help out the rich, that's why we're marching. Not enough bailouts for Goldman Sachs.
These guys are incorrigible old Marxists, so they want to see everything as class warfare between the workers and the capitalists. So they miss the real class division that is driving the tea party movement: a division between the producer class versus the parasite class. It's a division between people who take on the responsibility of supporting themselves and who end up having to pay all of the bills for runaway government, too, versus the people who want to live off of our work. That includes the poor people who are, for example, getting checks from the government for "tax credits" on income taxes that they never paid. This is the new form of welfare, by the way, because it's a way that politicians can give handouts while calling it a "tax cut." So you give people a tax credit that they can claim as going toward an income tax "refund," even though they don't make enough money to pay income taxes in the first place. It's a handout disguised as a tax refund. But we're also angry about the guys making $150,000 a year as bureaucratic paper-shufflers in Washington, and the guys with politically connected businesses who are getting money from bailouts and the stimulus and the "green jobs" racket.
It's not about rich versus poor. It's about parasites versus producers. It's about takers versus makers.
And for those of us in the producer class, even when we actually do get some benefit from government, we're smart enough to know that we're going to pay for it all in the end. Milton Friedman once said that a nation's true effective tax rate is the rate of government spending—no matter what the official income tax rate is. When the government spends four trillion dollars every year, that money has to come from somewhere, and sooner or later it comes out of our pockets. It's going to come in the form of increased income taxes that we're going to have to pay when the bills start coming due for this spending spree. Or if it isn't income taxes, it's going to be newest brainwave out of Washington, the Value Added Tax, a kind of national sales tax that we pay on top of all our other taxes. It comes in payroll taxes and sales taxes and property taxes. It comes in inflation, when the government just prints the money it needs to pay its bills and wrecks the value of your wealth and your savings. It comes in the economic growth that doesn't occur, the wealth that is not created because more than one out of every four dollars we make is being diverted from producers to parasites.
If there's a war between these classes, between the government class and the producer class, then they started it. What is driving this war is that the government class has a contempt for producers and for wealth creation. You can see this expressed in thousands of little ways. Nancy Pelosi tried to sell the health care bill by saying how good it would be for unemployed artists: "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance." So notice that these people are considered to be in nobler and more worthy professions, which should be supported by government, as opposed to those who hold productive jobs.
And then there is Michelle Obama's advice to college graduates encouraging them to "move out of the money-making industry" and "into the helping industry." So if you work for government, you're the good guys because you're "helping" people, which makes you better than those money-grubbing jerks in the private sector.
All of this goes against the grain of American history and American culture.
Editor's Note: This article is continued from yesterday's edition of TIA Daily. It is the text of the long speech I gave at this year's Tax Day Tea Party in Charlottesville, Virginia.—RWT
All of this goes against the grain of American history and American culture.
If only our leaders had had a similar attitude during the last year and half.
Contrast this to the people in government today. Membership in today's government class is frequently lifelong, and someone recently looked at the Obama administration and tallied up how many years of private-sector experience all of his top people have had, their experience at actually producing something, and it's the lowest level of private-sector experience ever, by a big margin. And that even includes FDR's administration, which was infamous for being dominated by "Progressive" Ivy League academics.
Again, notice the contrast to the Founding Fathers. I talked about Franklin, but it's also true of George Washington, who was a very successful farmer and a real estate investor. If you've been to Richmond and seen the renovated canals downtown, that's the old Kanahwa Canal Company, in which Washington was a prominent investor.
Thomas Jefferson is not exactly known for being successful at business, but Monticello was a working farm, and if you go there, they'll show you where they manufactured nails and bricks. And his father, Peter Jefferson, was one of these American self-made men, a surveyor who acquired a huge amount of valuable land out here.
How about Paul Revere? He was a silversmith. How about John Hancock? His is the most famous signature on the Declaration of Independence, and he was a merchant who was one of the richest men in the colonies. We get the short end of the stick today in this regard, when you consider who our billionaires are. We get George Soros. The Founders got John Hancock.
And how about Sam Adams? Anybody know what he did? I think I recall reading recently that he was a brewer and a patriot.
All of this is very reminiscent of the tea party movement. Most of the people who have started tea party groups are amateur political activists, not part of the professional political class. They are people who come from the producer class. We got the first preview of this with Joe the Plumber, back before the 2008 election. One of the tea party organizers I've met, for example, is a well driller. My favorite is Bill Hay, who started up the Jefferson Area Tea Party. He started the tea party group, but you know what he was doing for a living? He was a coffee roaster.
This history of America as a nation of self-made men, a nation of producers, is a crucial context for the American Revolution, and there's a reference to it in the Declaration of Independence. After the list of grievances against the King, Jefferson writes, "Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren," and he talks about various attempts the colonists have made to appeal to the king and the parliament. He then writes: "We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here." Notice how specific that is: "the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here."
Jefferson is referring to something he himself wrote two years earlier. In 1774, Jefferson published a pamphlet called A Summary View of the Rights of British America. It was what really put Jefferson on the map and made him one of the intellectual leaders of the Revolution. Jefferson had trained as a lawyer, and the Summary View is basically a legal brief giving the case for the colonists against the crown.
He addresses the argument made at the time by the British. About ten years earlier, Britain had provided troops to fight the French and Indian war. They protected the colonists against attacks from Indians, and they kept us from becoming French—for which I am personally very grateful. But the British government then started making an argument that amount to this: because we helped you, we now own you. Because we provided protection during the French and Indian war, we have an unlimited authority to tax you and we can also meddle with your legislatures and change your system of government however we like.
Against this claim of unlimited power, Jefferson made the argument that the colonists had produced their wealth by their own effort and didn't owe it to the government. He wrote:
"America was conquered, and her settlements made, and firmly established, at the expense of individuals, and not of the British public. Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual; for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold."
In technical legal terms, Jefferson argued that the property rights of the Americans were absolute, not conditional—that they owned their property free and clear and didn't have to rent it or buy it back from the king.
You can see how relevant this is to today: the idea that individuals produce wealth, not the government, and that they have an absolute right to what they create.
The modern attack on our rights is what we were talking about earlier, this idea of "helping" versus profit making. You can see it expressed in a phrase you might have heard, about successful people, businessmen being asked to "give back." Give back? What have they stolen?
Ayn Rand had a very interesting way of putting this point. How many people here know who Ayn Rand is, the famous novelist and philosopher? A lot of people have been reading Atlas Shrugged lately because it is so relevant to today's events, the bailouts and the creeping government takeover of the economy. And nobody is better than Ayn Rand on the moral issues behind this. The way Ayn Rand put it once is that the issue is not whether you give a dime to a beggar—this was before inflation, so you have to remember a time when a dime could actually buy something. She said the issue is not whether you give a dime to a beggar. The issue is whether you have a right to exist if you don't. The issue is whether you have to buy your life one dime at a time from anyone who comes up to you asking for handout.
By the right to exist, she means the right to have personal ambitions, to pursue a career, to support oneself and one's family—without having to buy permission for it. She meant the idea of one's rights as an absolute rather than something that is bought from the state.
You can see the connection here to Jefferson's argument in the Summary View. By the way, never let them pretend that the American Revolution had nothing to do with property rights and commerce and capitalism. The left wants you to think it was all about civil rights and the ACLU and closing down Guantanamo—that's what our Founders were really concerned about. But the Summary View is all about property rights and freedom of trade for American merchants.
In the Summary View, the main issue was free and clear ownership of land. Today, the issue is more serious. It's about free and clear ownership of your own life.
The left believes that you don't have a right to exist, you don't have a right to the pursuit of happiness, that you must be made to sacrifice to society, which means to the state. They believe that if you don't give a dime to a beggar, you have no right to exist and have to buy it back by paying taxes to support the welfare state.
I got an e-mail from one of my readers recently telling me about a case in Florida, where the local government was concerned that a local charity wouldn't be able to raise the same amount of money this year as they normally did, so they proposed a special property tax to make up the difference. That's the meaning of not having a right to exist if you don't give a dime to a beggar.
I said I'd have more to say on that article telling us that paying taxes is an act of patriotism. In the Boston Globe a guy named James Carroll wrote that we should show gratitude for paying taxes, because it is our chance to show our dedication to "the sacred treasure we share as a people." That "sacred treasure," he says, is the "commonwealth." And as any resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia knows, the "commonwealth" means the state. And then he goes on to say that "Taxes are its sacrament." So the state is sacred and taxes are its sacrament.
Now we know why all of these newly hired government bureaucrats think they're entitled to their lavish pay and benefits and lifetime job security. They are entitled to it because they belong to the proper ruling class, the class of non-commercial, non-profit-making bureaucrats, the Deputy Assistant Undersecretaries for the Giving of Dimes to Beggars. They are the new priestly class whose job is to make sure that you perform your sacrifice to the state.
Class divisions have never been about wealth. In Europe, from the Middle Ages on, there were wealthy commoners, merchants and tradesmen, who in many cases had more money than the nobility. So class is not about money, and that's why social classes have never really existed in America. Class is about power, about your relationship to the government. It's not about the rich versus the poor; it's about the favored vs. the unfavored. It's about those who enjoy special favors and support from the state, versus those who are forced to pay for the special favors enjoyed by others.
What we're seeing is the formation of a new kind of aristocracy. It's not a hereditary aristocracy. It's more based on going to the right schools, knowing the right people, making the right connections—or maybe joining the right public employees' union. In France—and Europe is farther along than we are on this path—these new aristocrats are called Enarques. Practically everyone in a prominent position in government in France is a graduate of the same school, a kind of college for bureaucrats. It's called the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, with the initials ENA, so they're called "Enarques," the rulers from the ENA. And what I think a lot of people are sensing is that we're getting this kind of aristocracy now in the United States.
In a sense, we are being called upon to re-decide the Founding of America. We have reached a decision point at which the American Revolution is either overthrown or begins to be restored. No wonder this has given rise to a new "tea party" movement.
The Declaration of Independence was a statement of self-esteem, of our right to exist. In the Summary View, for example, Jefferson talks about addressing the king in language that is "divested of those expressions of servility which would persuade his majesty that we are asking favors, and not rights." The point was to say: we own our land, we own ourselves, we don't have to buy back our freedom from the state—and we don't have to make any apologies for asserting those rights.
No message could be more relevant today.
When King George tried to deny our rights and sent a swarm of officers to eat out our substance, Americans had a tea party, and they kept going until they were able, in the words of the Declaration, "to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security."
And we're going to do it again.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of "The Intellectual Activist (TIA)" and contributor to "The Freedom Fighter's Journal."
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