Mike Schaff and other Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, “I’m above the government and all its services” to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them. For everything else it is, the government also functions as a curious status-marking machine. The less you depend on it, the higher your status. As the sociologist Thorstein Veblen long ago observed, our distance from necessity tends to confer honor.
