Tea Party

Steven Horowitz at Coordination Problem has an insightful post up discussing why, as of the time he posted his article, Europe lacks a Tea Party-like movement.

The answer may be that with European fertility rates, there just aren’t enough people who imagine they, or their descendants, will bear the burden of the debt to unite in such a way as to protest the spending orgies of the past or present.  Plus, if Europe is that much farther down the road to ruin/serfdom, it’s too late for the kind of arguments the Tea Partiers have made:  Europe is already where they wish to prevent the US from going.

If I’m broadly correct, it suggests an interesting hypothesis about the Tea Partiers:  to the degree they really are concerned about the future burden of spending and debt, their membership should strongly overlap with the demographic groups most likely to have an above average number of children and grandchildren. If the Tea Partiers are more exurban, politically conservative, religiously traditional, and likely to attend church than the average American, and it seems like they more or less are from what I’ve seen, then this is some evidence for the hypothesis.

There’s no Tea Parties in Europe both because they are farther down the road and because they lack a significant demographic group that is committed to above replacement fertility.  If what unites the Tea Partiers is a self-interested concern about their children and grandchildren’s future, it explains their high degree of motivation to get involved and explains why they have not taken off in Europe.

Well, on Saturday Brighton, England, hosted Europe’s first Tea Party.

[Brighton Tea Party leader Dan Hannan] noted that the cry at the original 1773 Boston Tea Party was “No taxation without representation” and that today in the US tax may be too high, but that it is not levied by people who are immune to public opinion. In Europe now, he said, there is the danger that we are going down the road towards a pan-European tax system, which was taxation without representation.

To those who might criticise him for aping a foreign idea in Brighton today, he said that there is nothing foreign about meeting to say that we as a people should have a say over what revenue is taken from us. Mr Hannan repeated his oft-made call for a complete rethink of the role of the state in Britain today and said that it was vital that minsters  push powers downwards and outwards and restoring democracy.

The Boston revolution led to power being dispersed, he concluded, and whilst he intended drinking tea this afternoon rather than dumping kegs of it in the Channel, he hoped that this would be the start of a revolution that will “restore honour and purpose to the act of voting, dignity to our legislature and freedom to our citizens”.

Emphasis added.

Socio-Political