I'm sure I've only seen a faint smattering of things people have said over the past few days. One of the best, which just grabbed this as part of a longer narrative arc, was Rachel Maddow:
"The Washington Times" reporting today, on the founder of TeaParty.org threatening Michael Steele and the Republican Party, saying, quote, "We are turning our guns on anyone who doesn't support constitutional conservative candidates. It's not going to be good for them. If they don't get that and their party chairmen don't get that, they are going to be ostracized."
It should be noted that the guy making that threat, the head of TeaParty.org, one of the founders of the tea party movement, is this guy, Dale Robertson. Take that in for a second. Yes, that is the "N" word, and yes, it's misspelled.
You know, it's usually ad hominem attack when you call someone an illiterate racist. But in this case, when the guy is both using and misspelling the "N" word, I think it's fair to say, just descriptively, without comment-you, sir, are an illiterate race. You are also the founder of TeaParty.org.
But even without exhaustive searching, I'm pretty darned sure that this point hasn't been made a whole lot: Slaveholders themselves are the origin of America's anti-tax/anti-government tradition. This history has been well documented by Robin Einhorn in her book, American Taxation, American Slavery, which is a penetrating look at what policies were actually implemented by which politicians.
For all the recent attention to the slaveholding of the founding fathers, we still know remarkably little about the influence of slavery on American politics. American Taxation, American Slavery tackles this problem in a new way. Rather than parsing the ideological pronouncements of charismatic slaveholders, it examines the concrete policy decisions that slaveholders and non-slaveholders made in the critical realm of taxation. The result is surprising--that the enduring power of antigovernment rhetoric in the United States stems from the nation's history of slavery rather than its history of liberty.
We are all familiar with the states' rights arguments of proslavery politicians who wanted to keep the federal government weak and decentralized. But here Robin Einhorn shows the deep, broad, and continuous influence of slavery on this idea in American politics. From the earliest colonial times right up to the Civil War, slaveholding elites feared strong democratic government as a threat to the institution of slavery. American Taxation, American Slavery shows how their heated battles over taxation, the power to tax, and the distribution of tax burdens were rooted not in debates over personal liberty but rather in the rights of slaveholders to hold human beings as property. Along the way, Einhorn exposes the antidemocratic origins of the popular Jeffersonian rhetoric about weak government by showing that governments were actually more democratic-and stronger-where most people were free.
A strikingly original look at the role of slavery in the making of the United States, American Taxation, American Slavery will prove essential to anyone interested in the history of American government and politics.
the tax history of early America actually involves much more than the Stamp Act and Nullification Crisis. It involves the taxes Americans levied in their own colonies and states and their own towns and counties. The moment we begin to examine these taxes, a startling pattern emerges. Over the long period of American history from the initial founding of the colonies to the outbreak of the Civil War, taxes were more sophisticated -- and usually higher -- in the North than the South. Along with the well-known geographical distribution of slaveholding, the less well-known organization of the northern and southern governments, particularly in the colonial era, almost turns this into a controlled experiment -- a laboratory test of the relationship between liberty, democracy, and taxation in the American past. People who lived in freer societies (little or no slavery) with more democratic governments (annually elected local officials) were more comfortable with taxation than people who lived in less free societies (lots of slavery) with less democratic governments (appointed local officials). Liberty and democracy actually produced better and higher taxes in early American history!
Northern taxes required more of the taxpayer in terms of intrusive administration. They usually were ad valorem levies based on assessments of the value of various forms of property, from land and buildings to commercial and financial assets. Southern taxes, meanwhile, usually were flat-rate levies based on nothing more complicated than simple reports of numbers of acres and people (slaves in particular). Southern states began to introduce limited assessment regimes during the Revolutionary War, but, as late as 1860, these regimes still did not compare with their northern counterparts in sophistication or coverage.
Why was this? One obvious explanation is that the democratically elected local officials who administered sophisticated tax systems in the North were more competent and trustworthy than the oligarchic appointees who administered primitive tax systems in the South. This was the explanation that Oliver Wolcott, Jr., the nation's second Treasury Secretary, proposed when he surveyed the state tax systems in 1796 and tried to account for their differences.
Yet liberty may have been as important as democracy, as the unusual experience of South Carolina suggests. Unlike Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, where the local governments consisted of appointed (really, coopted) county courts and sheriffs, South Carolina -- with hardly any local government at all -- managed to tax the commercial and financial wealth of Charleston throughout its history. But even South Carolina did not value the land or slaves of its plantation economy. No southern colony sent assessors onto plantations to value agricultural land before the Revolution -- and few southern states did it before the 1830s. The fact is that the "masters" of southern plantations refused to tolerate the intrusive procedures of tax assessment. Northern farmers, merchants, and artisans took these procedures in stride, but, of course, few Northerners were "masters" of their domains in anything like the same way....
In a democracy, the people can opt for a high-tax-high-service government or a low-tax-low-service government. Public decision-making of this kind is what democracy is for. Yet our debates about these important matters might make more sense if we could persuade ourselves to actually look at the tax history of early America, and abandon the false histories that invite us to see ourselves as Jeffersonian "masters." The fact is that Americans have often opted for higher taxes and stronger governments -- especially when they had the freedom to choose.
Around the time her book came out, I interviewed Einhorn for a story I did for Random Lengths about California's chronic anti-democratic condition. Here's an excerpt:
If California's non-voters made their voices heard, state policies could be dramatically reoriented in a more progressive direction, according to a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), "California's Exclusive Electorate," written by PPIC research director Mark Baldassare.
California's electorate is significantly whiter, older, wealthier, and more educated than the population at large. "As its population has become more diverse, its voters have become less representative of that population," the report, notes. "And the difference between voters and nonvoters is especially stark in attitudes toward government's role; elected officials; and many social issues, policies, and programs."
For example:
* Governor Schwarzenegger's reelection chances would plummet. In May 2006, non-voters disapproved far more sharply (61-21 percent) than likely voters (48-42 percent).
* The $3 billion affordable housing bond (Prop 1C) could easily pass: 80 percent of nonvoters support it, versus 49 percent of likely voters in a May poll.
* California could have bigger government and higher taxes: Nonvoters prefer higher taxes/more services to lower taxes/fewer services by a 66-26 percent margin, compared to 49-44 percent among voters.
The correlations revealed in the report reflect larger relationships observed across time and geographical boundaries. A 2001 paper from the Brookings Institute, "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?" found a direct correlation between welfare state spending and the size of minority populations--the more minorities, the lower the levels of spending. This held true both internationally (comparing more then 60 different countries) and nationally (comparing all 50 states).
In America, hostility to taxes derives from the Southern slaveholder class, according to a new book, American Taxation, American Slavery by U.C. Berkeley historian Robin Einhorn.
"What I found is that in early American history, slaveholders in particular were terrified of majorities deciding how to tax them. So they came up with strategies of how to stop that," Einhhorn told Random Lengths.
"There is a long tradition of denying majorities the right to decide how to tax wealth in this country," she added.
California requires a 2/3 majority to pass its budget, which has effectively blocked tax increases on wealthy Californians to help balance the budget in recent years, even as spending has slashed, and "fees" on community college students and others have skyrocketed. Such legislative restrictions are one form of protection pioneered by slaveholders. Limiting the franchise was another.
"What we've got here is that a majority can't decide how to tax elites because of the lower voter turnout and the skewed population of voters and non-voters," Einhorn said, commenting on the report.
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