Slaying The Beast, Pen In Hand!

This Peggy Noonan article speaks to me and it speaks to the motivations of the Tea Party movement.  I have no idea how long the link will last as the article is supposed to be behind their firewall.  Here's another that might work.

If you write a column, you get a lot of email. Sometimes, especially in a political season, it's possible to discern from it certain emerging themes; the comeback of old convictions, for instance, or the rise of new concerns. Let me tell you something I'm hearing, in different ways and different words. The coming rebellion in the voting booth is not only about the economic impact of spending, debt and deficits on America's future. It's also to some degree about the feared impact of all those things on the character of the American people. There is a real fear that government, with all its layers, its growth, its size, its imperviousness, is changing, or has changed, who we are. And that if we lose who we are, as Americans, we lose everything.


...


And what I get from my mail is a kind of soft echo of this. America is not Greece and knows it's not Greece, but there is a growing sense,I should say fear, that the weighty, mighty, imposing American government itself, whether it meant to or not, has for years been contributing to American behaviors that are neither culturally helpful nor, as we now all say, sustainable: a growing sense of entitlement, of dependency, of resentment and distrust, and an increasing suspicion that everyone else is gaming the system. "I got mine, you get yours."


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Because Americans weren't born to be accountants. It's not our DNA! We're supposed to be building the Empire State Building. We were meant, to be romantic about it, and why not, to be a pioneer people, to push on, invent electricity, shoot the bear, bootleg the beer, write the novel, create, reform and modernize great industries. We weren't meant to be neat and tidy record keepers. We weren't meant to wear green eye shades. We looked better in a coonskin cap!


There is I think a powerful rebellion against all this. It isn't a new rebellion - it was part of Goldwaterism, and Reaganism - but it's rising again.

The Consent Of The Governed

Via Powerline

I think the more significant cause, however, is the general one--a growing conviction that America is governed by a political class that has its own agenda, involving its own enrichment as well as the endless expansion of its own power, and that this political class is contemptuous of the opinions of ordinary Americans and is determined to impose its will regardless of how Americans vote. I think this perception is in fact true.


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There have been several occasions when the American people have voted for smaller government; most notably in 1972, 1980 and 1994. But it really doesn't matter. You can vote for limited government, but you can't get it; the political class won't let you. This is not to assert the silly proposition that there is no major difference between Democrats and Republicans. The fiscal disaster that we have witnessed since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 proves the contrary. But still: experience shows that voting for Republicans hasn't been enough to offset the power of the political class.

Biden: Tea Parties Aren't Racist

And the President shares that point of view.  Good to know!

“I wouldn’t characterize the Tea Party as racist.  There are individuals who are either members of or on the periphery of some of their things, their — their protests — that have expressed really unfortunate comments.


(…)


“I don’t believe, the president doesn’t believe that the Tea Party is — is a racist organization.  I don’t believe that,” Biden said.  “Very conservative.  Very different views on government and a whole lot of things.  But it is not a racist organization.”

Where Were The Protests?

One of the current criticisms of the Tea Party folks that drives me nuts is when people ask why the Tea Party folks didn't protest George W. Bush when he was creating the initial round of bailouts.

Who knew?

At the time we were treated to all sorts of economic horror stories.  Free market economies experience recessions.  The are an unpleasant but necessary part of any healthy, growing economy.  The only way to experience the boom is to have the bust.  It is hard to defend free markets in the middle of a deep recession.  You get called all sorts of ugly names.

Who knew that the problems at AIG might have been addressed some other way?

Who knew that healthy banks would snap up the bankrupt ones right away?

Who knew that Morgan Stanley Goldman Sachs and many European banks would benefit from Congressional largess?

Who knew that part of the problem was federal regulators with the authority to stop the worst abuses were actually spending their time downloading porn?  On Mr. Bush's watch, in case you weren't paying attention.

We were faced with "do this and do it now or else".  Who knew that there were other options?


The ugly fact of the matter is that recessions come and go.  And while some small portion of the money spent in the early days of the recession might have been defensible, the larger part of that money has been summarily wasted.  We would have a healthier economy now if we had simply let the contraction continue until the markets really stabilized.  At least then we would know where we were.

As of right now, we sit with a hole of unknown depth below us as we wait for the next over inflated market to collapse to its true value.

Just In Case......

....you thought the Tea Party folks were all right-wing racists.

When Olbermann is Uber-wrong

link

Times They Are A Changin'

If she is successful, then Princella Smith may be the first black, woman Republican in Congress.  She would also be the first Republican to represent her district since 1872.

A Visit With Congresscritter Don Young, R-AK

Kind of an interesting guy.  Sounds like he's put together pretty well.  Pity there aren't more like him.

Mischaracterizing The Tea Partiers

A frequent theme in my regular reading is the serial mischaracterizations of the Tea Party crowd on the part of our friends in the major media and their fellow leftist travellers.  A. Barton Hinkle expresses many of my thoughts on that subject quite well here.

The nut of his rejoinder is quite accurate.

Yet as J.R. Lucas wrote more than three decades ago, equality has more than one dimension, and efforts to tame economic inequalities can produce bureaucratic empires that crystallize "an inequality of power . . . more dangerous than the inequality of wealth to which objection was originally made." Members of Tea Party Nation may simply prefer to tolerate monetary inequalities rather than to hand more power over their lives to progressives who, while purporting to care about the great unwashed, sometimes treat them with casual contempt.

Having witnessed the damage that government mischief can cause from afar as well as up close, I do not trust that they will use the new authority under consideration in a wise and responsible manner.  The vagaries of the market are preferable to the iron fist of bureaucratic authority and politically derived preferences.

The continued trend of disregarding that legitimate perspective and misrepresenting its proponents are not healthy for our country.

Tea Party And Race

The major media misunderstands almost every aspect of the Tea Party movement.  Their often repeated lie is that Tea Party gatherings are lilly white rallies of borderline klansmen.

Wrong.

Ordinarily, a free market doesn't reward businesses and people that produce valueless goods and services. Oh snap!  So that's why newspaper circulation is down and MSNBC's viewship is in this the toilet!

Carry on.

Party Time

Andrew Breitbart has an opinion piece over at his Big Government site where he attempts to explain the underpinnings of the Tea Party movement.  It is worth a read.

Summing up his thoughts:

THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT WANTS AMERICA TO RETURN TO CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES.

I would add to that......rough language ahead.....

   
• Leave me the fuck alone.

And also.....paraphrasing here....

   
• People don't like to be meddled with. The government tells us what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. They are in our homes and in our heads and they haven't the right. They're meddlesome.

More on the original text here.

I can hear the rejoinders already.  "That means that you want to do away with the EPA!  You want children and old people to die in the streets!  You want dirty drinking water!"

Um, no.

What I want is clean government.  That means no earmarks.  That means no holding the government hostage until you get a DoD airplane contract for your district.  That means government employees that can account for every dime in their agency's budget.  I am unwilling to accept the status quo on these issues.  I want Congresscritters that fight corruption rather than inviting it regardless of party affiliations.

What I want is Constitutional government.  There are some areas of our life that should be beyond the reach of our imperial federal government.  Education funding and regulation comes quickly to mind.  Perhaps the English language has changed over the last 230+ years, but I can't find the authority to fund and regulate education anywhere in the U.S. Constitution!  Nor can I locate an Amendment that grants that authority!  It must be that the feds are being meddlesome without our permission!

That whole consent of the governed thing is pretty important.

What I want is a government that is on a budget; a balanced budget.  The "Tea" in "Tea Party" stands for Taxed Enough Already.  Ain't it the truth, brother.

If Congress or the President feels the need to create a new program, then fine.  Which existing program are they prepared to cut?  How many federal employees are they going to layoff to pay for their new hair brained scheme?  Are they ready to strong arm the unions representing federal employees to get wage and benefit concessions?

They take too much of my hard earned income as it is.  They have repeatedly demonstrated that they lack the capacity to spend that money wisely.  The only rational solution is to cut the amount of money they have to spend until they can account for how it is spent, the activities they fund prudently accomplish their stated objectives, and those same activities promote the cause of individual liberty.

I am Taxed Enough Already.  They have taken more than I can afford to spend.  The piggy bank has been emptied.  As has been happening in the private sector forever, it is time for our government and our government employees to be down-sized, "right-sized", "bright-sized" and potentially even "capsized" along with the rest of us.

Our government representatives and employees in my local township get it.  We still get the services we need.

Our government representatives and employees in my local school district get it.  We still get the education we need.

Our government representatives and employees in my local county get it.  We still get the services we need.

Our government representatives and employees in Michigan state capitol get it.  We still get the services we need.  "Need".....not "want".  There is a difference.

It's time for our government representatives and employees in Washington D.C. to get it.  Permanently.

He's Learning

Either one of Mr. Obama's handlers is slipping, or perhaps he's beginning to listen to people outside of the Presidential bubble.

The last thing I will say, though -- let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we've presented -- and there's some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your -- if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you're not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge. [emphasis added]

 It seems that even Mr. Obama understands that the Tea Party folks have actually read the bill and have a legitimate basis for their protest.  Now let's see if that understanding spawns any different behavior.