I'll Want My Money Back

Back in the mid seventeen hundreds there was a lot of stuff going on that required brave and forward thinking decisions by courageous, articulate, fair-minded people. Luckily, we seem to have had quite a few folk like that back then.

For example, the Stamp Act of 1765, enacted by the British Parliament, mandated that revenue stamps be affixed to all newspapers, pamphlets, licenses, leases, or other legal documents. The revenue garnered by those stamps would be used in theory for "defending, protecting, and securing" the American colonies. Over in England, the financial burden seemed so evenly and lightly distributed that the measure passed Parliament with little debate. Of course, it wasn't their lives on which those members of Parliament were voting so their decision was probably fairly simple.

The violence of the reaction in the thirteen colonies, however, was impressive and completely surprising to Parliament. The act aroused the hostility of the most powerful and articulate groups in the colonies -- journalists, lawyers, clergymen, merchants, and businessmen, north and south, east and west -- because it wasn't fair.

In the summer of 1765 trade between the colonies and England practically stopped. Prominent men organized as "Sons of Liberty," and political opposition soon flared into rebellion. Inflamed crowds paraded the streets of Boston. From Massachusetts to South Carolina the act was nullified, and mobs destroyed the hated stamps.

The Virginia Assembly passed a set of resolutions denouncing taxation without representation as a threat to colonial liberties.

A few days later, the Massachusetts House invited all the colonies to appoint delegates to a Congress in New York to deal with the Stamp Act. This Congress, held in October 1765, was the first inter-colonial meeting ever summoned on an American initiative.

No taxation without representation became the battle cry of the American Revolution.

So here we are about to vote on whether or not people in the State of California should be denied basic rights extended to the majority of the population. If that initiative passes, it seems only fair and completely democratic, according to the wisdom of our founding fathers, that all who are denied rights afforded to others should be given tax breaks. We could call those breaks the "We Screwed Them Tax Cuts" or the "We Think We're Better Than You" tax cuts.

On Wednesday morning, if the YES folks have won their absurd battle, it's only fair that those who have lost their constitutional rights be reimbursed for past taxes and given on going tax breaks until the day their rights are restored.