You don’t hear much about the Tea Party today. Based on the 1773 actions of the Sons of Liberty, the modern Tea Party is less romantic- and significantly less likely to have their deeds related to public school children in the next fifty years.
But the Tea Party is still alive, and its values are still important. The MAGA movement may have eclipsed it, but the Tea Party still has something to say- even if under another name.
The Tea Party was treated like a clan of mental defectives by the now disgraced left-wing media. Much like President Donald Trump himself the Tea Party suffered merciless attacks from Hollywood, television, news outlets, and received no fair hearing on college campuses.
Whether members of the Tea Party itself even realize it, the chief issue they supported is the nonaggression principle. This, as we will see, is the foundational principle of all American values. It is the basis of our God-given rights, and it is the essence of a just society.
It began, more or less, in 2008 when Fox News pundit Juan Williams commented that the Tea party had emerged from the ruins of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. Paul himself has said that the Tea Party got its start in 2007 when supporters held a record-breaking fundraising effort on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.
Starting in 2009, the Tea Party began a series of protests pushing for conservative values in general. Values such as the right to bear arms, small government, tax reform, state’s rights, and the reduction and elimination of a number of socially funded programs. This was the birth of a movement that simply embodied the values of at least 50% of the population- values that include the non-aggression principle.
The principle of nonaggression, must not be mistaken for pacifism. There is an important distinction between violence and defensive action which must be understood. Violence means perpetrating any action which constitutes a violation of another person’s life or property. We do not commit violence when we defend ourselves or another from anyone who has initiated force. The initiation of force is aggression.
The right to obtain and possess the tools and skills required for self-defense, and adhering to the principle of nonaggression are the two pillars of natural rights. These are the foundational values that our nation and all western principles are based on- and they are the very principles that are under attack by leftist, Marxist, socialist entities.
As Americans, we begin with an understanding that human freedom cannot be taken for granted- that each generation must struggle to maintain and expand it. To do this we must respect our neighbors and possess the ability to protect our communities. It is a fundamental law of nature that the weaker creature is destroyed by the stronger creature. The American experiment was designed to be the most robust protection from this reality, but it requires the citizens of the nation to be strong and share a common affection for the community. This is called patriotism.
These simple ideals are under attack- principally- by the imposition of taxation, the redistribution of wealth, the watering down of education, and the overreach of federal powers. The longer these evils remain in effect, the more complicit the people tend to become- the more we learn to tolerate evils as “just the way things are.”
These natural human principles lead us to simple realizations about the nature of reality, the world that God created. In the absence of government indoctrination, we know that taxation is theft. Taxes are taken on threat of violence. The monies taken are used in ways that we cannot measure or even know of with any certainty. But, when the modern public school indoctrinated person is confronted with the simple wholesome truth that taxation is theft, they will ask you how the roads will be paid for if not through the taking of taxes.
But what few people realize is that before 1913, there was no income tax. Prior to that, the government was able to fund itself on tariffs and other duties of exchange. The 16th Amendment, written to create an income tax to pay for US involvement in the first world war, set the precedent. We were told that the tax burden would disappear when the war ended, and here we are- over a century later- still laboring under this immoral burden enforced by the barrel of a gun.
This leaves us with the inevitable question of how infrastructure and other public services were paid for. The answer is, people took care of the needs of their communities. The standard shorthand for this is the Free Market Principle. It is the obvious notion that people, communities, and businesses will act in their own best interest- and this interest often has large areas of overlap with the common interest.
Before the new deal reforms of the previous century, charity concerns were dealt with by private individuals and private organizations. Only when people began to see charity as the job of the government did we defer our duty to care for our neighbors to Uncle Sam. One might consider this one of the most pernicious attacks on our national character. Having dispensed with our will to care for each other- we were well on our way to becoming an amoral people.
Indeed, the more we depend on a centralized government to provide for us, the more we give away our own morality- the weaker and more obedient we become. Eventually, we learn to see government as a necessary evil- and not an evil necessarily.
The truth of this is evident in the treatment dolled out against the Tea Party of 2007/8 by a vicious and slandering media- and the way President Barack Obama himself used the Internal Revenue Service to assault members of the Tea Party with endless audits, investigations, and exorbitant bills for nebulous infractions.
That is why the Tea Party still matters- because any time the establishment takes aim to directly at any group or person- we know without doubt- that we are seeing directly into the heart of the battle between good and evil.
