Republicans in this 21st century have clearly enunciated that cutting taxes is the only political game they play. But Republicans, particularly Tea Party Republicans, have announced this as part of a broader denunciation of the United States federal government in general. Indeed, the adoption of the Tea Party allusion to the 1773 Boston Tea Party is their proclamation of a rebellion against the United States federal government. But the facts belie that allusion: they are actually emulating the Shays Rebellion of 1786. The Boston Tea Party was not fundamentally a tax protest, since the Tea Act lowered the tax on tea, while the Shays Rebellion was entirely an anti-tax rebellion.
The Republican Party of today is fundamentally anti-tax. The current Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is known to have multiple overseas bank accounts to avoid paying taxes to the United States. Romney also exploited a tax loophole, designed to provide a limited tax deferral for middle-class taxpayers, to avoid paying income taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars in income. He was audit chairman of a corporation busted by the I.R.S. for a bogus tax dodge. Knowledgeable insiders have stated that Romney rarely pays any federal income taxes at all. Over and over, Republicans are staking out the position that successful individuals in the United States owe nothing to their government.
President Obama said we, all Americans, benefit from the infrastructure provided by government taxes and the Republican Party went ballistic in denial. President Obama stated that each of us succeeds in life not just from our own efforts but from the combined efforts of a society in which the government infrastructure provides a nurturing environment for success. Republicans vehemently disagree and their Presidential candidate Romney is making this a political issue defining the 2012 campaign, repeatedly employing businessman proclaiming in advertisements that the government did not “build” their business (even though in some cases those businessmen turned out to be largely federally financed). Their fundamental disagreement, however, is with paying taxes to fund that infrastructure.
Indeed the Republican Party’s longstanding anti-tax political leader, Grover Norquist, has successfully demanded that Republicans pledge to never increase taxes. He has, in fact, created an online list of Shays Republicans who have signed that pledge. That this list is more than just a tax protest, but rather a rebellion against the United States government can be seen in Norquist’s often repeated claim that their ultimate goal is to reduce the federal government to a size where they can “drown it in a bath tub.” The Republican Party is by every measure a new Shays Rebellion. They don’t call themselves Shays Republicans, but they are. Indeed, I doubt they even know the significance of the Shays Rebellion in American history but they are, in fact, Shays’ philosophical descendants.
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