I will not be so foolish as to believe that my presence or those of my compatriots, at Topeka’s Tax Tea Party will be able to change what has already happened. Our goal is not to somehow rescind the already appropriated funds for the alphabet-soup scheme of government programs passed for the ostensible purpose of resuscitating a weakened economy. Our goal is to dispel the notion that there are no costs to extravagant government expenditures, only mystical multipliers. There is a limit to what government may spend without exceeding the upper bound of sanity. That limit was reached several hundred billion ago.

In addition, as the stimulus bill and TARP came out of the shadows into the sunlight, the American people have realized what an effrontery to good sense these enactments were. We do not deny the real harm done by the dysfunctional credit markets-we do deny that these enactments will do anything to ameliorate the present conditions without an unbearable concomitant increase in moral hazard and the debt burden of future generations.

We may have been seen through disdainful eyes with our sloganeering and ad rem coalitions, but we were jubilant in protest. Even though we may be erroneous in thought, we will have the confidence in knowing we did not accept truth by prejudice, circumstance, or convenience. John Stuart Mill understood, as elegantly expressed in On Liberty, that if ideas are not “vigorously and earnestly contested”, they will lose all value and merely become rote formulation-a static function waiting to be manipulated for another day’s use.

Those who attended the tax protest were not living in some alternative universe, ignorant of those suffering in current economic straits. But we were not convinced by argumentation along the lines of “something must be done, this is something, and therefore we must do this”. Nevertheless, we are concerned that our elected officials are living in some alternative universe, ignorant of the concerns of the American taxpayer and voter. That was the message that over 500 gathered citizens sent last Wednesday. And by many indications, it will be a message heard on high.

Lance CahillPresident, Washburn University College Republicans(913) 972-5582