Thomas Friedman

In a column perfectly representative of the increasingly common conventional wisdom on taxation, Tom Friedman is outraged that Sarah Palin doesn't think there's a "patriotic" duty to pay higher taxes...

...[Sarah Palin] declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic. ...  I can understand someone saying that the government has no business bailing out the financial system, but I can’t understand someone arguing that we should do that but not pay for it with taxes.

Tom Friedman apparently endorses the "shut up and pay" approach to taxation, wherein the elites tell us what we owe them and it is considered unfair, even unpatriotic, to question how much they wish to spend.  Where to start?

• Eating, breathing and defecating are also necessary endeavors, but one would hardly call them "patriotic."
• Thomas Friedman doesn't appear to understand the distinction between granting the legitimacy of some level of taxation and questioning whether there is some sort of "patriotic" duty to pay any amount of money the government demands. 
• Sarah Palin's objection was specifically to "higher taxes", Friedman promptly neglected to notice the word "higher" and argued that Palin opposed taxation itself. 
• What's more, Friedman argued that Palin had suggested people who pay taxes "should not be considered patriotic" - a brazenly absurd attempt to suggest that Palin had actually called taxpayers "unpatriotic". 
• Eating, breathing and defecating may not be components of patriotism, but they appear to be higher on the list of qualifications for a New York Times editorialist than, say, basic reading comprehension.

Republicans are losing the public opinion fight on taxes.  When the concept of taxation shifts from "necessary evil" to "fair share" and even "neighborly" duty, then we can expect the tide of public opinion shift from "leave us alone" to "it's only fair".  

When combined with a tax system that is not broadbased and uniform, and which allows Democrats to sell tax hikes as "somebody else's problem", the fairness/duty framework is a very dangerous problem.  In that environment, the Right will be unable to avoid losing ground on the level of taxation, the nature of the tax system and the size and role of government.

Unfortunately, Republicans seem to have given up the moral case on taxation (i.e., it's not the government's money; government wastes our money) that they made so successfully in the 60's, 70's and 80's, in favor of short term electoral arguments (i.e., buying votes with tax cuts) and exaggerated utilitarian arguments (e.g., tax cuts boost the economy).  Those have worked for some time, but without the moral premise, those arguments have had declining utility. 

The Right won't be able to win a majority again until we radically change the story we are telling - and conventional wisdom - on taxes and the role of government.