Karma is not an exclusively Hindu idea. It combines the universal human desire that moral accounts should be balanced with a belief that, somehow or other, they will be balanced. In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe that bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they have done.

WHAT makes tea partiers tick? Jonathan Haidt, a trailblazer in the scientific study of the psychology of moral sensibility and judgement, says it's conservative conviction in "karma" . Perhaps this is not what you were expecting? Mr Haidt elaborates:

Mr Haidt goes on to argue that, as conservatives see it, since the New Deal, liberals in power have been trying to suspend the karmic laws of cause and effect, insulating individuals from the injurious effects of vice and poor judgement. Birth control and abortion detached sex from it's natural consequences, welfare rewarded indolence and illegitimacy, and so on. "Now jump ahead to today's ongoing financial and economic crisis," Mr Haidt says.

Again, those guilty of corruption and irresponsibility have escaped the consequences of their wrongdoing, rescued first by President Bush and then by President Obama. Bailouts and bonuses sent unimaginable sums of the taxpayers' money to the very people who brought calamity upon the rest of us. Where is punishment for the wicked?

Not only are sinners saved from their just desserts, in the karmic conservative's scheme, the virtuous and true are punished for their industry through unjustly burdensome levels of taxation and bureaucratic interference. Studies show liberals are more likely to treat equality as a moral baseline, and to see wealth and poverty as lucky or unlucky draws in the cosmic lottery. For them, the state acts well when it intervenes to smooth the unequal wages of fortune. However, Mr Haidt contends, "[f]or the tea partiers, federal activism has become a moral insult. They believe that, over time, the government has made a concerted effort to subvert the law of karma."

This is an intriguing hypothesis, and Mr Haidt offers a number of pieces of evidence to back it up. The data he sets forth, it turns out, strike a blow to the idea that the tea-party movement is primarily animated by "libertarian" sentiments.

Here's a statement about the positive side of karma: "Employees who work the hardest should be paid the most." Everyone agrees, but conservatives agree more enthusiastically than liberals and libertarians, whose responses were identical. And here's a statement about the negative side of karma: "Whenever possible, a criminal should be made to suffer in the same way that his victim suffered." Liberals reject this harsh notion, and libertarians mildly reject it. But conservatives are slightly positive about it. The tea party is often said to be a mixture of conservative and libertarian ideals. But in a study of 152,000 people who filled out surveys at YourMorals.org, led by my colleague Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California, we found that libertarians are morally a bit more similar to liberals than to conservatives.

Mr Haidt goes on to note that libertarians differ as strongly as do liberals with conservatives about the importance of "group loyalty, respect for authority and spiritual sanctity" among moral considerations. Mr Haidt seems to suggest that these differences in moral temperament will cause the largely conservative tea-party movement to fail to fully integrate its libertarian rump. This prediction rings true. For over 40 years libertarians have been an impotent drop of oil in the conservative gallon bucket. One is almost tempted to say that libertarians pinning their hopes on tea-party triumph deserve what they've got coming to them, but, alas, there is no karma.