Journal Article

The Tea Party challenge

Magnet, Myron

2010

Overview

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' labor 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. What unifies the many Tea Partiers interviewed on the Pajamas Media TV Web site 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.

• Publisher: Institute of Public Affairs
• Subject: Bailouts / Deficit financing / Medicaid / Medicare / Mortgages / Presidents / Public administration / Recessions / Taxation / Taxes