There certainly is lots of heated political activity these days in regards to the issues of taxes (including estate taxes), public budgets, and the role of government within society and the economy. Now, adherents of what is being labeled the “Tea Party” are pushing an anti-tax and anti-governance ideology, on the premise that this is in the original traditions of American revolutionary independence. This article by Andrew M. Schocket goes some way in detailing how such an ideology doesn’t quite jive with historical fact.

Does allowing a small number of families to accumulate great wealth — increasing from generation to generation — harm democracy? The United States Constitution’s ban on inherited titles met with unanimous approval because of the perceived threat posed by lords and earls to a democratic republic. Similarly, Americans have always understood that establishing a small group of families with seemingly unlimited wealth, social privilege, and political power undermines a fundamental American principle: that all citizens are legally and politically equal.

Some founders wanted to eliminate inheritance entirely. In a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson suggested that all property be redistributed every fifty years, because “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Madison gently pointed out the plan’s impracticality. Benjamin Franklin unsuccessfully pushed for the first Pennsylvania constitution to declare concentrated wealth “a danger to the happiness of mankind.”

Read Death, Taxes and The American Founders

And this speech by Bill Moyers, originally delivered back in 2005 on Losing The American Revolution, helps lay out the lie of some of the disingenuous logic and history pushed by the corporatists and their political lackeys in their radical, market fundamentalism, which is currently eviscerating the social and economic fabric of America.

They’re back, my friends. They’re back in full force and their goal is to take America back - to their private Garden of Eden in that first Gilded Age when “the strong take what they wanted and the weak suffer what they must.” Look no further than today’s news: William Donaldson, who made a decent stab at enforcing post-Enron reform on Wall Street, is out as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; according to USA Today, the President’s big donors - the captains of finance - cashed in their IOUs and came away from the White House with his head on a platter. In his place: A right-wing congressman who takes a dim view of shareholder suits and favors eliminating the estate tax, the dividend tax, the - well, there’s no tax on wealth he doesn’t want to eliminate. Once again the chicken coop is sold to the fox.

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Here’s the point: The last thing ideologues want is reporting about the facts on the ground. Facts on the ground subvert the party line. That’s why if you live where rightwing talk radio and media monopolies dominate the public discourse, you are told a hundred different ways every day why unregulated markets work better than democracy. It’s a lie, but it works, because you are never told the other side of the story. But here, on PBS one Friday evening, was the other side of the story. Here were ordinary people who are in pain for reasons not of their own making. And it was more than a rightwing apparatchik could take. Because too much of the truth might set those people free. Might take them to the voting booths - or even to the streets - to declare: We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!”

Read a transcript of the complete speech Here.