After the Tea Parties

AFTER THE TEA PARTIES

I went to one of those TEA Parties. You know: Taxed Enough Already. I showed up at an intersection near where I live. There was no program; no speakers. Just hundreds of people with homemade signs and flags. Lots of cars and trucks passed by, honking their enthusiasm. The rallies across the country on April 15^th were not simply about taxes. They were also about bailouts and the explosive increase in government spending. Nagging concerns reached a crescendo that day. Average Americans fear losing freedom. We recoil from the bondage of massive debt and government tyranny. We worry about our kids: Charles Colson said in that day's Breakpoint: "parents are supposed to leave their children better off, not saddled with debt."

 There is a real parallel between these grassroots TEA parties and the Boston Tea Party, because both are inspired by citizens' desire to be free from excessive government control. The colonists understood that if they accepted a tax, even if it was greatly reduced...and only on tea, they would be accepting the British Parliament's sway over their lives. Texas Governor Rick Perry has been called the "darling" of the TEA Parties. He warns that massive government regulation is too steep a price for accepting stimulus money.

 There's a looming fear settling over the land. Is the economy absorbing all this federal spending at too great a cost, with too many conditions? The passion rising from mainstream America makes you wonder: how did conservatives squander the governing power we possessed so recently? Are conservatives better at opposing big government than we are at governing? What is our role in a society in which liberalism, now called progressivism is encroaching on traditional family values, free market capitalism and religious freedom?

 On TEA Party Day, USA Today reported on its poll showing that "Most Americans Are OK With Big Government, at least for now." But there's a caveat. By three to one, those surveyed say government's expansion should be cut back when the economic crisis is over. Good luck with that! President Obama's "Make Work Pay" tax cut would take the percentage of Americans who do not pay taxes from 40 to 50 percent. That's the critical mass needed to vote in a permanent low-growth welfare state.

 As government grows and increases "benefits" it assumes more responsibility for...well...just about everything.

Big government crowds out other institutions from the public imagination." People get in the habit of looking to government for things that family, church, and community organizations used to provide. For the most part, these institutions foster virtue in their beneficiaries. Government does not. In becoming less productive and self-sufficient, we also morph into a sterile, increasingly amoralsociety.

 Politicians should not ignore the recent TEA parties. If they do not have an immediate effect on policy, they will have an impact on elections in 2010 and 2012 and perhaps beyond.