"Revealingly, the Tea Party’s vigilance over the dollar we spend for public services doesn’t seem to extend to the dollar we spend for private services, even when they are supplied by regulated monopolies. In Kentucky the rates of cable companies, the phone companies, the electric utilities are all subject to government oversight. But when Kentucky utilities recently proposed to increase utility bills 10 times more than any proposed library tax the Tea Party was MIA. According to the FCC, cable companies raised their prices at twice the rate of inflation from 1995 to 2010, boosting the average household’s bill by an astonishing $400 a year. The Tea Party circulated no petitions. Its members filed no lawsuits.
But if a library raises taxes by $1 a year the Tea Party’s pitchforks appear, the Declaration of Independence is waved, the founding fathers invoked, an American-as-apple-pie institution forcefully attacked."
