Tea Parties--The Ultimate American Party

Americans have always loathed being asked to pay their fair share of anything. This is, after all, the “land of the free—lunch”. If they can’t get it free, they want it cheap—quality be hanged.
I’ve talked about how an American secretary will go to a discount store and buy a dozen cheap outfits that last only months—whereas a European secretary, specifically the French, may buy only three or four outfits—but they will last (and look good) for years.
American car manufacturers understood their market for years—making cars designed to go only about three or four years and then be replaced. Only when cars started to cost as much as small houses did Japanese and European cars that run longer appeal to the American buyer.
GM and Chrysler’s troubles aren’t all of their own making. They have for decades given the American consumer exactly what he wanted (as K-Mart and Walmart did with clothes); they were blindsided by the change in consumer sentiment brought on by high prices.
And—have you noticed?—American voters have made an art of keeping both parties in enough power to ensure that no one will take their government freebies (Social Security, Pell grants, etc.) away and no one will make them pay the full cost for them.
That has gone on for so long that both voter and government seem to assume that it can go on forever—after all, who says that what goes up must absolutely come down? It hasn’t happened in American politics; why should it start now?
Now the people who object to making health care available for all Americans are rallying their troops with “tea parties”. If you don’t have health insurance, the attitude seems to be, “Go out and get a job”--ignoring the fact that fewer and fewer jobs come with benefits.
The hostile attitude toward government comes with a horrific fear of government. The government that we trust to build roads, highways, airports, water mains, sewers—to protect us from the outbreak of strange new diseases, to fund medical research, to fight to keep our oil supplies coming—that government would suddenly be a monster if it took over health care.
By building roads and highways, government has made the auto industry the most heavily subsidized industry in human history. And where would Boeing be if government didn’t build airports and maintain safe air routes? But subsidize health care for the poor and sickly, the under-insured, those in jobs without benefits? God forbid!
It’s a bit like the situation back in the 1760s when the British government asked Americans to pay their fair share of the costs of a war that protected them from the French and Indians. We rioted, we burned houses, we boycotted—until London gave up.
Or in the 1770s when London—admittedly to save some British investors—subsidized a tea company (no American government would EVER subsidize a company, right?) and allowed tea prices to fall far enough that it became cheaper to buy legal tea than the stuff brought in by American smugglers like John Hancock, we held the “Tea Party” to end all tea parties right there in Boston harbor. A huge amount of money was lost.
The British government reacted by defending the investors (again, no American government would act to defend investors over the desires of price-driven consumers, right?)—and we had a shooting war on our hands.
We would have been in serious trouble if the French, our old enemy, hadn’t taken the opportunity to get revenge on Britain by supplying us with 90% of our munitions, cannon, warships and troops. We repaid them by signing a separate treaty with England that left France in the lurch. She went broke, her government collapsed—and we didn’t have to pay.
Yes, indeedy, tea party time is definitely American. Especially when someone has the nerve to ask us to pay for something. We’ll take it free when we can, cheap from the lowest bidder when we absolutely can’t get it for nothing. Ah, piffle.