End the War on Freedom

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED AUG. 14, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
The natives are restless

"As key Democrats and Republicans huddled behind closed doors trying to break an impasse over a proposed new Tennessee income tax, 2,000 protesters rushed up the Capitol steps, screaming, 'No means no!' and smashing a few windows," the Los Angeles Times reported from Nashville in mid-July.

"It was a bona fide tax revolt, and it worked. ... The tax-thwarting protest was the handiwork of two talk show hosts who took to the airwaves and put out an urgent S.O.S. ..."

Next, coming on the heels of the successful Tennessee revolt, "Taxpayers in Tennessee's parent state of North Carolina held their own protest ... during which they tossed teabags at legislators and gained the upper hand on Democratic lawmakers who are pushing for a dramatic tax hike," wrote Andrew Cline, managing editor of the Carolina Journal, last week for the National Review online (www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-cline080301.shtml.)

"They just keep raising taxes," Cline quoted one protester, as "About 1,000 North Carolina taxpayers rallied behind the state legislative building on Tuesday for a 'Tar Heel Tea Party' in hopes of halting in its tracks a nearly $600 million tax increase proposed by the Democrats who control both houses of the state legislature and the governor's mansion. ..."

Is something happening here? And if so, why is the news so well hidden by much of America's print media?

"If this was a groundswell around the nation to have bottle bills, it would be the cover of Time magazine, 'Bottle Bill Mania Sweeps the Country,' comments Grover Norquist of the Washington-based think tank Americans for Tax Reform.

Print coverage may have been less thorough than broadcast coverage of these events for three reasons, surmise Mr. Norquist and John Hood, of North Carolina's John Locke Foundation, which helped promote the North Carolina event.

First, the events are happening far from Washington, D.C., from which many of the nation's news desks now operate. It's easier for the cable TV networks to pick up colorful footage of protesters dressed as grim reapers or colonial Minutemen and beam them around the country in minutes than for deskbound editors to dispatch reporters to seldom-visited locales like Nashville and Raleigh during the understaffed summer.

Second, the more hidebound media outlets tend to be pro-government and pro-tax in their outlook -- there may be evidencing a subconscious reluctance to give credence to such groundswells.

And last, these events are being promoted by talk radio hosts. Some in the print media are still reluctant to acknowledge the growing upscale audience of these radio stations in the cell phone era, and also still look down on them as unworthy competitors "leading the hunt for the black helicopters."

But why are the protests happening in the first place?

"In history class we learned about rising expectations," replies Mr. Norquist of ATR. "People revolt not when the French king is at his most Draconian, but when the French king is loosening up, liberalizing. Then people say, "Well, we want more of this," Similarly when we cut taxes we remind people that it's possible to cut taxes. ...

Federal spending has fallen from 22 percent of GNP to 18 percent today, while the percentage of the nation's economic output being consumed state and local spending has grown from 9 to 12 percent over the past 20 years, Mr. Norquist notes.

"So thanks to the victory in the Cold War, thanks to welfare reform, thanks to some restraint from the Republican Congress ... that's almost a 25 percent cut in the size of the federal government as a percentage of the economy. There has been no state that has done anything close to that level of reform. ..."

"Six percent of the nation's GDP is spent on education, and private schools spend half what government schools do (per student.) So ... you could drop state and local spending by a quarter just by getting state government schools as cost-effective as private schools ... I think that people are coming to demand of state and local governments the reforms that they've seen in the past six years in Washington. ..."

Norquist identifies Florida, Arizona, Colorado and Texas -- but not Nevada under Gov. Kenny Guinn, who he declines to identify as a fiscal innovator -- as states where Republican dominance in both statehouses and governors' mansions could soon bring that kind of cost-cutting to the local level.

"Tax reform, tort reform, property rights -- it's Reagan and Gingrich brought down to the local level. After Reagan was elected it took 14 years to have Reaganism take over the House and Senate, and now that's finally being pushed down into the state level. ...

"People are growing impatient, because they're not seeing those kinds of reform at the local level. So in those states that are refusing to reform, that are in fact moving in the wrong direction with new tax hikes like Tennessee and North Carolina, you're seeing riots."

Successful riots.

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Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224.

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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken