The Morning After

The big Tax Day Teaparty is over. Tea Partiers were egged in Boston by some of the "violent radicals" among the progressive mevement. Spurred on, no doubt, by the bigoted language of politicians on the Left.

Some thought from newpaper columnist James Lileks, No Taxation without Satirization:

A Rasmussen poll says 66% believe we’re overtaxed. Hmm: 47 percent don’t pay federal income tax. So 19% feel overtaxed? This either means they think they’re getting totally jobbed when it comes to taxes on cigarettes or lottery lump-sum payouts, or they have a great fellow-feeling for the taxpayers who do shovel the shekels to Uncle Sugar, and believe those guys need a breather. If nothing else, it suggests there’s a general mood afoot that believes the government hoovers up too much, and not because it has so many obligations. It raises taxes for the same reason they say a dog, er, does that thing it does: because it can.

But at least a dog comes when it’s called. Add high taxes and feeling that government just might put its own needs ahead of yours, and you have discontent. Add the sense of overtaxation with the realization that we still have to go cap-in-hand to China to borrow the occasional trillion, you get something: an entirely new opportunity for the Republicans to squander.

Read the whole thing.

Roger Kimball with some thoughts on Hayek and others who saw situations similar to ours today:

President Obama would be proud of me: this morning, it being the 15th of April, I got out my check book, searched the innermost recesses of my savings accounts and lines of credit, and with a few strokes of the pen helped to “spread the wealth around ” . . . .

“But,” you point out, “taxes haven’t really risen yet.”

Precisely. And yet even so here’s an ordinary slob like me feeling like Boxer in Animal Farm. What happens when the taxer-in-chief really gets going?

It was at this point in my musings that I thought about the 19th-century English essayist William Hazlitt: “those who lack delicacy,” he pointed out, “hold us in their power.” Early on in the Obama administration, Governor Mitch Daniels spoke about Obama’s “shock and awe statism.” . . . we now see just how much in earnest Obama was when, a few days before the election, he told his followers that they were on the threshold of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

The point is that Obama and his coterie have moved with dazzling speed on every conceivable front to transform the country. And he’s only, remember, 15 months into it. The rest of us stand about dazed and confused, exclaiming (as our two-year-old daughter is wont to do): “What just happened? ” Read on for two important observations by Hayek about how government is now affecting you life - psychologically as well as financially. Compare with the typical progressive theories about economics and power.

And think about what is happening in Greece.