Tea Partiers: Mere Knee Jerks?

As we, ahem, celebrate Tax Day today, there are those who take greater pleasure (of sorts) in the revelry than most. They are the Tea Partiers, the widespread yet rather uncoordinated mass of people who are protesting too much government taxing and spending. Today is, quite naturally, a prime time for them to call attention to their concerns.

It would be easy to call the entire movement knee jerk, and there is perhaps good reason for believing as much. There are without doubt many folks on all sides of the political spectrum who simply call certain things wrong merely because they oppose them on general principle rather than exact detail. Such movements may safely be summed up by Groucho's famous line: "Whatever it is, I'm against it". It may be shallow rationale, but is it always all that pig headed?

Not if general principle is on their side. Government spending is not usually very efficient. In fact, it is notoriously inefficient. The great economist Milton Friedman summed that up quite well with his famous quip about spending other people's money on other people. In short, where there's no real vested interest in sound spending we tend to get unsound spending. The only real way to quell that is to cut off the source of cash. In the case of government, this means taxes.

Those who dismiss the tea party folks as missing the boat, as even mislabeling their cause (after all, it is our elected representatives who have imposed the taxes at issue) miss the point themselves. Though an important right to have taxation with representation, that in and of itself is not the catch all be all. The taxes imposed in and of themselves must still be reasonable and proper to their aims as well as to the proper role of government.

So if many in the Tea Party factions are little more than knee jerk, so what? They are better than the knee jerks of the left. Even if only by happy accident, they stand on firmer ground.