Mad Tea Party

Well, tax time has come and gone, so one hopes that we've heard that last of this Astroturf “tea party” movement - unless Faux News decides to continue sponsoring it as aggressively as they have to date.

I won't bore you with the details or why it's all so stunningly hypocritical to see a bunch of middle-class white folks whining about paying the taxes that make their comfortable middle-class life possible. Besides, the picture accompanying this rant neatly labels some of the things taxes pay for and without which the protestors would have been, as they say, SOL. As they say in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

What does this have to do with technology? Quite a bit, actually.

To begin with, the Internet - that world-wide network of networks that makes it possible for you to read this and for the tax protesters to organize and distribute their grievance lists - exists only because tax dollars were spent to create its foundation.

Yes, kids, the Internet - that Holy of Holies for the libertarian, “all government stinks” movement - began life as a government-funded project called ARPANet in the 1960s. Initially built by BBN with Defense Department funds, the nascent network had only four nodes, three of which were at public (as in “taxpayer funded”) universities. It would be decades before it grew robust enough to stand on its own and attract tons of venture capital.

There's nothing surprising about this. Basic research - the intellectual heavy lifting that must precede any big technological advance - is always expensive and rarely yields a short-term payoff. It's the sort of thing that governments do well and that business, with its myopic focus on the short-term bottom line, no longer does at all.

If the Tea Party crowd had its way, none of this would happen and we'd all be worse off for it. Heck, according to some analysts, we're already pretty far down that increasingly ill-paved road already thanks to eight years reckless spending on unnecessary foreign adventures coupled with a steady decrease in funding for research.

In his Principles of Economics Gregory Mankiw (former chairman, ironically, of Boy George's Council of Economic Advisors) notes: "To get one thing that we like, we usually have to give up another thing that we like. Making decisions requires trading off one goal against another."

You like having police and fire protection, roads, bridges, water and sewer service, a functioning court system, an ever-expanding prison system, disaster recovery assistance, a standing army, public education, libraries, and an entire regulatory infrastructure to discourage fraud and enforce contracts? Well, you can't have all that without giving up something else you also like (money) at tax time - especially when you combine all those things with multiple wars of invasion and occupation.

So the next time you get an email whining about taxes, remind the sender that taxes are what made it possible for the email to be sent in the first place. There's no free lunch. Deal with it.