Feb 01 MN2020 Wrong about the Tea Party Movement

It is déjà vu all over again.

I just read Jeff Van Wychen’s piece at Minnesota 2020 disparaging the “Tea Party” movement (his “”) for misappropriating American history. I recommend the piece by the way; it provides a very accurate picture of the economics surrounding the Boston Tea Party, one not always understood even by conservative students of American history. Van Wychen’s facts are accurate; it’s his analysis that is flawed.

Van Wychen correctly points out that the rage of the colonists was not about the amount of the British tax on tea, which actually resulted in a lower price on tea than colonists paid before the tax (and lower than colonists paid Dutch smugglers). Rather, Americans objected to the principle of any tax imposed upon them by government officials that they had no voice in choosing.

“Modern tea partiers can make no such claim of ‘taxation without representation,’ writes Van Wychen. “At the federal level and in all 50 states, taxes are imposed by elected representatives.  You might not have voted for the current officeholders, but you still had the opportunity to vote.  Americans and Minnesotans today are taxed with representation.  Thus, there is no connection between modern tax protesters and the patriots who dumped tea into the Boston harbor nearly twelve score years ago.”

Which creates the sensation of déjà vu.

Progressive think tank Growth and Justice President Dane Smith uses the same argument whenever I challenge him to define the limits of government. Smith’s argument, which pervades Van Wychen’s argument, invokes the “just powers” clause of the Declaration of Independence and “popular sovereignty” to contend that in a democracy “free citizens” have a natural right to impose virtually any tax to fund any program limited only by the will of the majority. The progressive assumption is that “the governed” decide for themselves the limits of a democratic government (as Smith puts it) “responsive to the will of the people and a largely a force for good.”

That progressive idea is the misappropriation of the American experiment.

Democracy, majority rule, is how Americans make collective decisions; however, majority rule does not determine when it is legitimate to make collective decisions, a point both Smith and Van Wychen miss. Republican (small “r”) government and a Constitution protecting minority rights defines when collective decisions are required. Americans do not get to vote on when they get to vote.

The phrase of the “just powers” clause that progressives ignore is “just powers.” Words have meaning, and the “just powers” governments derive from the consent of the governed are only those powers that we as the governed have the right to consent. I have no right to consent to government authority to impose legislation that curtails my neighbor’s individual sovereignty, takes his private property for the personal benefit of others or violates the Rule of Law (tyranny of the majority is still tyranny).

As it always has, the United States faces many economic and societal problems, which government MIGHT address under the progressive belief that government may tread wherever and whenever the majority (through their elected officials) dictates. What government that is granted specific and limited authority by the Constitution SHOULD do is far more restrictive.

Consider an issue that has ignited the Tea Party movement – federal involvement in health care. The federal government is granted no authority by the Constitution to involve itself in individual health care decisions beyond its duty to protect individual sovereignty, private property and the Rule of Law by protecting contractual rights between individuals and and enforcing contractual obligations in cases of force or fraud. We do not get to vote on whether there is a “public option” health care plan.

Van Wychen is correct when he says that tea partiers have constitutionally protected free speech rights -- but they also have constitutionally protected property rights and the right of individual sovereignty over their own health care decisions. Our Constitution guarantees the Rule of Law. These rights cannot be arbitrarily taken away by an act of Congress, democratic election notwithstanding.

Recognition of the “self-evident” truth of natural rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence is the nexus between modern tea partiers and the Boston colonists of 1773. It is a bond beyond patriotism.

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