KINDER'S COMMENTARY: IRS HEARINGS MAGNIFY FOCUS ON ROLE OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

There can be little doubt that the best Republican move since last November's election was the holding of hearings convened by the U.S. Senate's Finance Committee to look into the Internal Revenue Service. For three days, the nation was mesmerized as four witnesses told riveting stories of their travails at the hands of the IRS. These hapless taxpayers were followed by equally riveting testimony from IRS agents. All but one of these agent-informers demanded that their identities be concealed and their voices electronically distorted, rather in the manner of mob informants, such was their entirely justifiable fear of retribution.

This one, as they say in the PR business, has legs. An ancient, basic axiom of successful football coaches has it that if a certain play is shown to work, repeat it. If the off-tackle play gains you seven yards on first down, the gridiron school I subscribe to says you run off-tackle, again and again, until the other team stops it.

If a self-confident GOP leadership can recover its senses, they will take this show on the road. If there were four taxpayers whose tales could command the attention of a nation from Capitol Hill, then what about hearings in Boston and Atlanta, Chicago and Denver, Phoenix, Dallas and Sacramento? We need two, five, 20 such regional hearings. As Chairman Mao used to say, "Let a thousand flowers bloom."

Demonstrations of the true culture prevailing inside the IRS provide chilling evidence of a too-often rogue agency, out of control and bent on extracting not always what a taxpayer rightfully owes, but rather whatever the extortionate traffic will bear. This is a brutal exercise of arbitrary power. Nothing could be more antithetical to a free society.

The dramatic IRS revelations take place against the backdrop of, and serve to illuminate, a debate currently raging within conservative ranks that is, in truth, as old as the Republic. What is the nature of government in a free society? Is it friend or foe to the ordinary citizen in his or her aspirations for freedom?

Alexander Hamilton and his followers in the Federalist Party favored what they called "the energetic executive" -- a government big enough to do lots of good things. Hamiltonians are the intellectual and political forebears of today's defenders of Big Government.

Arrayed against the Hamiltonians are the intellectual and political descendants of his adversary, Thomas Jefferson. In a recent essay the redoubtable Bob Novak collected a few gems from the Jeffersonians, who implored us in timeless language not to trust government to good but to "bind it down with the chains of the Constitution." From Novak's column:

"Thomas Paine in Common Sense wrote, `Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.' In 1787 Jefferson warned of the `degeneracy of government' and, writing to James Madison in 1789, of the `tyranny of legislatures.' A half-century later, Madison told the Virginia constitutional convention that `the essence of government is power ... liable to abuse.'"

Bingo.

Consider the instinctive response of the left, from President Clinton on down, to the IRS hearings that ended with an abject apology from the current IRS chief. They pooh-poohed the hearings, said we had heard it all before, that the offenses represent a tiny minority etc. Clinton even said IRS performance has improved on his watch.

They know better. And so do the American people. Sign me up with the Jeffersonians. And, while we're at it, for a ticket to the IRS road show when it plays St. Louis.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.