"That's our money."
Is it really?
Although I wish their numbers were in the millions, naturally I'm delighted to see the Tea Party demonstrations attracting crowds numbering in the thousands.
A remark by one demonstrator particularly caught my attention:
Tea party supporters say their reasons for demonstrating on Fountain Square are simple.
"To actually show the state and federal government that we're displeased with the way that they're handling our money. That's our money," said George Piper.
That's our money.
In those three simple words, he summed up the whole problem in a nutshell. Not just the problem with the goverment, but the problem with the citizenry.
The fact that it's our money is so basic as to not require explanation, much less extended commentary. We all know that, and I mean everyone, from left to right.
Certainly every reader of this blog knows that the money the government spends comes from the taxpayers.
So why bother to remark the obvious?
Because for reasons that elude me, a large number of people do not understand that the government is simply not a huge, magical, money-producing pot. Nor is it a blank check. The worst thing about this is that many of the people who do not seem to understand this are intelligent and educated people who ought to know better. People who learned in school that the goverment derives its revenue from taxpayers, but who still think the government is a giant magical money pot.
People who know that taxes are deducted from their paycheck, yet who somehow (through an inexplicable and irrational thought process) simply don't think it's their money.
If I could understand the precise mechanism of how seemingly rational and thinking people can both know something and not know it at the same time, I could probably make millions.
Or murder millions; Stalin famously observed that one man dead is a tragedy, a million men dead a statistic. The same principle is implicated with money. A guy who haggles over a couple of dollars will look the other way as the government automatically deducts thousands -- because he doesn't think the money is "his." Yet he knows it is, because he knows he earned it.
Shrinks would call it denial, maybe cognitive dissonance. In the case of not knowing where the government gets its money, it's collective denial. People accept it because it happens to everyone else. (Yean, well, except those who make the rules....) If the government were to single out only one employee in ten for tax withholding, that would be seen as unfair. Not because of the tax withholding, but because people want to be treated equally. Yet that doesn't go far enough towards explaining the inexplicable. True, the fact that something happens to everybody makes it seem fair, but what explains the bizarre misperception that your money is not yours?
The collective human mind is terrifying in its infinite capacity for denial...
posted by Eric on 03.16.09 at 10:13 AM
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