tea parties

Congressman Mike Doyle: $3.5 Trillion in Spending is Too Little for the Government to “Spend Any Money”

by Hans Bader on August 2, 2011 · 3 comments

in Economy, Features, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Post image for Congressman Mike Doyle: $3.5 Trillion in Spending is Too Little for the Government to “Spend Any Money”

Even after the modest reductions in spending resulting from Sunday’s deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, the federal government will still spend $3.5 trillion in 2012 — compared to $2.9 trillion in 2008. But Congressman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) had a big tantrum yesterday that the spending won’t be even bigger: “We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said. Referring to the Tea Party, he lamented that “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.” (The Tea Party doesn’t control either House of Congress; Democrats control the Senate.)

His reference to peaceful Tea Party members as “terrorists” was echoed by Vice President Biden. “Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having ‘acted like terrorists’ in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit.” Although Biden regularly voted to increase the debt limit as a senator when a Democrat was in the White House, he and Obama voted against such increases when Republicans were in the White House, even when such debt ceiling increases were needed to pay for federal programs and wars that Biden had voted for. Unlike some Tea Party Republicans, Biden did not make any constructive suggestions about how to rein in deficit spending when he voted against increases in the debt limit. He simply did so to score partisan political points.

Doyle’s claim that Tea Party members are terrorists was echoed by some intemperate left-wing op-ed writers, like The New York Times‘ Joe Nocera, who claimed today that “Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.” Curiously, although left-wing journalists depict peaceful Tea Party members as terrorists, they depict violent Greek anti-austerity protesters who oppose cutbacks in deficit spending as “largely peaceful” even when such protesters firebomb banks, resulting in the deaths of innocent people. To them, “peaceful” simply means you don’t question the big-government status quo.

Even with the cuts in the July 31 deal to lift the debt ceiling, America is still spending so much money that its credit rating may be downgraded by Standard and Poor’s. That might wreak havoc on the economy, but The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman called for even more deficit spending in an August 1 op-ed. His frequent lament is that President Obama is insufficiently “progressive,” even though Obama is by any reasonable measure the most left-wing president in history. The federal budget deficit is now $1.6 trillion — compared to $160 billion in 2007. But even increasing the deficit by a factor of ten just isn’t enough for progressives like Krugman.

To Many in the Media, A “Peaceful” Protester Must Support Big Government

by Hans Bader on July 5, 2011 · 1 comment

in Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

A lot of blood has been spilled in protests against Greece’s rollback of its incredibly generous welfare state, yet the media routinely refer to those protesters as “largely peaceful,” notes A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The media’s indulgent treatment of these big-government supporters, which occasionally hints that violence by the protesters is understandable in light of Greek austerity measures, contrasts sharply with its unrelentingly negative depiction of Tea Party protesters, who have yet to kill anyone or burn down any buildings, but who aroused media ire by opposing the 2010 health care law, which they perceived as a government takeover of the health care system.

Rioting protesters in Greece killed three bank employees in their rage over possible budget cuts.  “The protesting civil servant workers trapped the bank employees in a burning building.”

But as Hinkle notes,

According to one story in The Wall Street Journal, the demonstrations “began peacefully.” According to another, last week Constitution Square in Athens “seethed with indignant, but peaceful, demonstrators.”

“The day began noisily but peacefully,” intoned The New York Times on Wednesday. The Washington Post likewise observed that “a peaceful protest . . . quickly degenerated into violence.” Reuters reported that, regardless of “clashes between stone-throwing masked youths and riot police . . . thousands of peaceful protesters demonstrated against the austerity plan.”

Sure, blood was spilled. But don’t blame the protesters. As the Journal reported, it was Greece’s parliament that approved a “widely hated austerity package” despite “the best efforts of peaceful grass-roots activists, megaphone-touting [sic] labor unionists, and stone-throwing anarchists.”

This is a sharp contrast from how, say, Tea Party protests against the passage of ObamaCare were treated.

The D.C. protests in March of last year were nonviolent affairs, without a single arrest despite one disputed episode in which someone allegedly hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis and spat on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. (No independent report could verify the allegations.) But that didn’t stop ABC’s David Muir from reporting that “shouted words turned very ugly,” and reporting on “late word from Washington tonight about just how ugly the crowds gathered outside the Longworth office building have become.”

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Andrew Sullivan Blames Tea Party for Budget-Busting Deal That He, Not It, Supported

by Hans Bader on January 21, 2011

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The deficit is largely the result of “feel-good” bipartisan policies supported by the political establishment. But rather than taking credit for the deficit it helped to create, the liberal establishment blames it on political outsiders like the Tea Party who have little influence over public policy. Sometimes, the Tea Party is accused of supporting policies it had nothing to do with.

Writing at his blog at The Atlantic, liberal journalist Andrew Sullivan recently faulted the “Tea Party” for the recent budget-busting deal between Obama and congressional leaders that exploded the deficit by extending tax cuts, unemployment benefits, and government handouts: “immediately after the election, moreover, they did a deal borrowing a huge amount more and adding $700 billion to the debt.”

The irony is that Sullivan, one of Obama’s biggest cheerleaders, had earlier endorsed that very deal, a deal also endorsed by other liberal media like the Washington Post because of the government handouts it contained. In an explanation that was hard to follow, Sullivan said that this new “stimulus package financed by borrowing” would somehow create “the best context for serious reform” of the nation’s finances, providing a “big new stimulus” that would help Obama “as he moves toward re-election.”

By contrast, some Tea Partiers publicly opposed the deal. A Wall Street Journal article quotes a Tea Party activist and Senate candidate saying that “she decided to run after watching Congress pass legislation during this month’s lame duck session, including a package of tax cuts, that added to the national debt.”

Most Tea Party bloggers took no position on the deal. The few that did either opposed it or reluctantly supported it as the best one could expect from a government that would still be dominated by liberals in the next Congress (with Democrats controlling both the White House and the Senate).

I criticized the deal in a blog post that was reproduced at a blog called “Freedom Action“” that includes many Tea Party members. It drew no objections from any blogger or reader at that site (which has more than 300 members). I noted that the billions it will spend on extending unemployment benefits won’t stimulate the economy, but will financially burden states. 30-40 state unemployment funds are already insolvent or teetering on the edge, thanks to past federal extensions of unemployment benefits. Giving people unemployment benefits for years on end discourages people from taking lower-paying jobs, and results in some recipients gaming the system. It encourages people not to relocate in search of work, and not to take productive jobs that they think are beneath them, even if those jobs are the only jobs that they will realistically find once their jobless benefits come to an end, because of the disappearance of the type of job they once performed.

As the Heritage Foundation notes, “The consequences of extended unemployment benefits are some of the most conclusively established results in labor economic research. Extending either the amount or the duration of UI benefits increases the length of time that workers remain unemployed. UI benefits subsidize unemployment. They reduce the incentive unemployed workers have to search for new work and to make difficult choices–such as moving or switching industries–to begin a new job.” (The deal also contains other disincentives to work.)

Admittedly, the deal is not as economically-destructive as some of the measures that Obama previously pushed through Congress on party-line votes, such as the $800 billion stimulus package, which actually shrank the economy in several ways. (The stimulus used “green-jobs” subsidies to send American jobs overseas. 79 percent of those subsidies went to foreign firms, such as an Australian firm that imported Japanese wind turbines, effectively outsourcing American jobs. It also wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.)

The Meaning of Civility in the Aftermath of the Tucson Shootings

by Hans Bader on January 13, 2011

in Culture, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

In his speech last night, the president called for more civility in American discourse. I discuss what commentators mean by “civility” in a commentary at the Washington Examiner. Appeals to civility are plagued by hypocrisy, double standards, and viewpoint discrimination.

As we noted earlier, there’s no evidence that anything in the current political climate, uncivil or not, contributed to the Tucson shootings, and America’s political climate is fairly tame compared with other cultures and America’s own past.

Tea Party Express Hands Control of Senate to Democrats?

by Hans Bader on November 3, 2010

in Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

By intervening in GOP Senate primaries in Delaware, Nevada, and Colorado, in favor of candidates who went on to lose the general election to relatively unpopular Democratic incumbents, the Tea Party Express may have ensured continued Democratic control of the Senate.  The GOP picked up no more than six seats in the Senate, leaving it with at most 47 seats out of 100. By contrast, in the House of Representatives, where the Tea Party Express played much less of a role in selecting GOP nominees, the GOP took control of the House, picking up around 60 seats.

The GOP’s failure to gain more seats in the Senate has left Obama with a relatively strong hand in making judicial and other appointments.  To stop an Obama nominee from being confirmed in a majority Democratic Senate, Republicans will usually need to come up with 40 votes to filibuster that nominee.  But getting 40 of 47 senators to agree to do that will be difficult in most cases, since the Republican Senators from some states like Maine are liberal on judicial issues, and some others who are not liberal, like Senator Hatch, philosophically object to filibusters over appointments (as opposed to legislation).  This means that except in extreme cases, the GOP will not be able to stop judicial nominees even when the GOP perceives them as disturbingly radical.

The Democrats’ loss of control of the House is a huge rebuke to Democrats and Obama, and reflects public opposition to Obamacare, the failed stimulus package, and the administration’s mishandling of the economy.  But the GOP’s failure to retake the Senate is a rebuke, too, to the stratum of the GOP favored by the Tea Party Express.  The Tea Party Express gave the Democrats and Obama continued control over the arguably most important house of Congress, leaving Obama with the upper hand in many political battles to come.

In September, I discussed in my personal blog how the Tea Party Express’s intervention in Delaware in support of Christine O’Donnell had turned a certain GOP victory into a certain GOP defeat, and how its intervention in Nevada in support of Sharron Angle made the GOP’s quest to oust unpopular Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid an uphill battle.  Had Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell not been nominated, the nominee would have been veteran moderate Republican Congressman and former governor Mike Castle, who was widely popular in Delaware, and was endorsed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is hardly a liberal RINO (Christie won a straw poll among Virginia Tea Partiers).  Castle would have crushed liberal Chris Coons in the election.  Instead, thanks to Castle’s loss to O’Donnell in the primary (where independent voters could not vote in favor of Castle), Coons easily defeated O’Donnell.

Had Sharron Angle not been nominated in Nevada, the nomination would have instead gone to Sue Lowden, a telegenic candidate with little political baggage who comfortably led Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in polls, and would have ousted him in November, putting her on a shortlist of potential future GOP vice presidential picks, and obviating the need for a Republican nominee seeking a female vice presidential pick to pick someone with more political baggage, like 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who probably cost McCain at least as many votes as she brought him.  (Owing to the absence of conservative GOP female senators interested in being vice president, McCain had little choice but to pick Palin if he wanted a telegenic vice-presidential nominee who could appeal both to the conservative base and to voters who wanted a gender-balanced ticket.)

Many conservative activists and bloggers think that there is a silent majority of conservatives in every state, based on the fact that their own circle of friends is overwhelmingly conservative. Unfortunately for them, that’s just not true. Most people don’t have much ideology at all, and many that do have an ideology are not conservative. Obama’s low poll results are primarily the result of a bad economy, and secondarily the result of his policy failures and mistakes, not the result of some great conservative awakening. The public is not outraged enough at Obama to vote for anyone who opposes him, no matter how conservative. Indeed, the public finds certain principled conservative positions disturbing, just as it finds certain Obama liberal positions disturbing. People who think the country is conservative beneath the surface are living in a bubble, just like the Obama supporters were deluding themselves when they came to the conclusion that the country had become staunchly liberal just because Obama won in 2008 based on the bad economy.  (Conservative activist Mark Levin claimed that Delaware could be won by O’Donnell because it was not a “deep blue” state — something that was true 30 years ago when Levin worked in the trenches, but is not true today, when Delaware is indeed deep blue, with Obama defeating McCain by a massive, enormous margin of almost 25 percent in 2008 – vastly more than in America at large, just as Kerry and Gore decisively defeated Bush in Delaware in earlier elections that Bush won nationally.  Levin, who makes his living in the conservative echo chamber by selling books read only by other right-wingers, personally attacked conservative lawyer Paul Mirengoff for pointing out the inconvenient truth that O’Donnell could not win a general election in Delaware.  Mirengoff’s influential conservative blog Powerline may have saved George Bush from defeat in his 2004 re-election campaign by exposing the Rathergate scandal.)

One illustration of the American public’s basically non-ideological, not-very-conservative nature, is the Nevada senate race, where Angle’s bluntly conservative views and candor cost her in the polls, and were characterized even by GOP political analysts as gaffes. If there actually were a silent majority of conservatives in America, Angle would have won, but she lost, even in a state that has a slight GOP tilt in gubernatorial elections, and even as the GOP won the governor’s race and two of three House races. (Yes, I am well aware that in polls, more people self-describe as conservative than liberals. But the so-called conservatives actually aren’t very conservative, as conservative analysts at places like American Enterprise Institute have noted. Self-described liberals are liberals across the board on both social and economic issues. Self-described conservatives include four types of people: (1) true-blue conservatives on both social and economic issues; (2) social conservatives who don’t understand economics and thus are liberal on economic issues; (3) economically-conservative people who are liberal on social issues; and (4) people who are not conservative on either economic or social issues, but call themselves that for reasons that are unclear. True-blue conservatives are actually rarer than hardcore liberals. Economic conservatives are also rarer than liberals.  Most people are neither conservatives nor liberals.  Sometimes the truth hurts. This is the unpleasant truth for conservatives. The Tea Party Express needs to deal with this truth, rather than living in fantasy-land.)

In Colorado, the Tea Party Express backed prosecutor Ken Buck in the GOP primary over former Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton, who had already been elected to statewide office and was more telegenic than Buck, resulting in the GOP’s narrow loss in November to Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet.  After a few controversial comments about “high heels,” and subjects like the origins of homosexuality and whether the founding fathers intended a full separation of church and state — all subjects entirely irrelevant to the Senate race and which Buck would have been wise to avoid — Buck lost to unpopular incumbent Michael Bennet by a fraction of one percent of the vote.  Norton would have narrowly won, and would have done better among female voters (In addition to his self-inflicted wounds, Buck was also injured by a smear campaign that depicted him as a sexist based on his perfectly reasonable decision not to bring a sex-crimes prosecution where reasonable doubt existed, a decision that even liberal newspapers admitted was a reasonable one.  Norton would not have had that baggage, and would have fared better among female voters.)

Bureaucrats Disenfranchise Overseas Troops

by Hans Bader on October 22, 2010

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty

Illinois officials missed the deadline to mail ballots to U.S. troops overseas, but they hand-delivered ballots to inmates, without even waiting for inmates to apply.

Perhaps this discrimination can be explained by the fact that inmates vote mostly for liberal candidates, while soldiers vote predominantly for conservative candidates.

There are federal laws requiring states to send ballots in a timely fashion to troops overseas, but the Obama administration is not enforcing them, as part of its ongoing politicization of the Justice Department (such as rubberstamping unconstitutional legislative proposals, and downplaying of voter intimidation by liberal activists, while investigating Tea Party pollwatchers who uncovered rampant voter registration fraud in Houston).

Meanwhile, Virginia Congressman Jim Moran (D) has dismissed his opponent, a retired colonel who served in the military for 24 years, saying that he has not “served or performed in any kind of public service,” and had simply “taken a government check.”  (Moran himself has collected a government paycheck for many decades, first as a state official, and then, for the last 28 years, as a congressman.)

Ignorance at the New York Times: Kate Zernike and the “Rule of Law”

by Hans Bader on October 8, 2010 · 1 comment

in Legal

The New York Times doesn’t know what the “rule of law” means.  In a story on the Tea Parties, reporter Kate Zernike claims that the “rule of law” is an “unwritten code” against government interference with “personal ends and desires” that has been adopted by the Tea Partiers.  She falsely attributed that strange definition to a book that she called a “once-obscure” text found on “dusty bookshelves” — the best-seller The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek.  Hayek was a famous free-market economist who received the Nobel Prize in 1974 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.  Hayek has been approvingly cited as a groundbreaking thinker by even liberal economists, like Harvard’s Lawrence Summers, an adviser to Presidents Obama and Clinton.  Summers has said that Hayek’s legacy is “the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today.”  But to liberal reporter Zernike, Nobel Prize winner Hayek is a strange right-wing wacko that no one ever heard of before he was discovered by the Tea Parties.

The Times also didn’t know what an S Corporation is, as it was forced to reveal in a correction to a recent article slanted in favor of tax increases.

Being liberal is a virtual litmus test for working at the New York Times (even its house “conservative,” David Brooks, endorsed Obama in 2008).  Being well-read is not, nor is having a basic grasp of the economy.  Those things would just get in the way of pushing a know-nothing Manhattan-liberal agenda, like claiming that increases in government spending are good for the economy (even though increases in spending typically wipe out jobs in the long run, and often do so even in the short run).

As the Economist notes, “the rule of law, as Hayek understands it, does not, as Ms Zernike writes, prohibit government from interfering with the pursuit of personal ends and desires,” but rather embodies “ideals of impartiality, generality, and equality before the law.”  Nor is it supposed to be an “unwritten” code: indeed, “the rule of law” according “to Hayek ‘means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand.’ Typically, these rules, once fixed, are written down and then published. . . The idea is that politically-determined rules need to be relatively fixed and publicly known in order to create a stable and certain framework in which individual planning and complex social coordination can flourish.”

Tea’d Off in The Capitol 9/12/09

by Michelle Minton on September 3, 2009 · 2 comments

in Odds & Ends

If you live in the general Washington, DC metro area you should be prepared for a fun-filled, traffic jamming time the weekend of September 11th. Thousands of citizens from all walks, incomes, and political backgrounds are slated to descend on the city for the so-called 9/12 March on Washington–the latest in the series of national tea party gatherings.

As I noted in my blog recounting my experience speaking at the Independence Day tea party the only way the tea party movement will affect public discourse is if attendees articulate principled and consistent positions. To that end, the Ayn Rand Center and the Competitive Enterprise Institute worked together over the summer months to put together a workshop on 9/11 for 300-500 people planning to attend the 9/12 protest in DC. Dubbed the “Intellectual Ammunition Workshop” CEI and ARC hope to draw in many of the intellectuals participating in the tea party movement and the most vocal grass-roots activists to discuss a positive message to bring to the protest.  By discussing the ideas beneath the tea party anger and stressing, not what politicians shouldn’t do but also what they should be doing, we hope that tea-party participants will communicate a powerful and effective message that members of congress can’t ignore.

Details about the workshop can be found here

Details about the 9/12 March on Washington can be found here

Argumentum Ad Governmentum

by Evan Banks on July 30, 2009

in Culture, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

One of the most popular logical fallacies I’ve encountered has been a heavy reliance on what I’ve come to call argumentum ad governmentum.

Relying on government to fight our ideological battles for us is a shaky means of convincing others to see things our way by arguing for majority standards and controls over minority beliefs. At its worst, argumentum ad governmentum is a way of getting others to act and think the way we would like them to by using a collective force of will to persuade local and central governments to exercise force against others on our behalf.

Unfortunately, utilizing government and legislative force as a value-laden battering ram will never win over hearts and minds to a cause, no matter how noble or praiseworthy we may think it is. Valid arguments are rational, logical, coherent, and do not rely on the use of force to prove a point. When you have won an opponent over by the weight of your argument and the prowess of your deductive reasoning, you have made an ally. When you merely force them to unwillingly bend to a system that claims their best interest in your name, you have made a slave.

As the philosophy of liberty says, this technique is sophomoric, and lacks any kind of deep thinking, rhetorical ingenuity, or honest discussion. From the video: “Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth and usually results in unintended, perverse consequences…achieving a free society requires courage to think, to talk, and to act.”

In Michelle Minton’s recent post recapping the events of last weekend’s D.C. Tea Party, she cites a conversation with a protester who was reluctant to allow limits on government interference in the lives of those who may not hold the same set of principles that she did. Michelle writes:

“Then I tried explaining that if she truly wanted government to stay out of her life and protect her liberty, she would have to extend the same principle to her neighbors—even if she didn’t like what they chose to do with their own lives. She wasn’t listening to me anymore though, she wasn’t interested.”

The problem is, of course, that we have to be interested when government takes liberties with others’ inviolable rights, even if we don’t agree with their values. H. L. Mencken, who was a journalist, editor, and critic of 20th century American life, once remarked that “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

Judging from some of the signage regarding several of the Obama administration’s policies I saw at the Tea Party last Saturday, conservatives are learning rather painfully that argumentum ad governmentum is a two-way street: If one side of the social debate capitulates and stoops to asking the government to initiate force on their behalf, you’d better believe the other side will follow suit when they have the opportunity to do so.

DC Independence Day Tea Party: My Perspective

by Michelle Minton on July 7, 2009 · 8 comments

in Bailout Watch, Culture, Features, Nanny State, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Stimulus to Nowhere, Zeitgeist


Over the last few months I have been keeping an eye on the tea party movement. My participation has waned and heightened throughout, from my first impressions to my ultimate conclusions about the utility of tea parties. This weekend I was able to glean a different perspective when they asked me to deliver one of the speeches at the DC Independence Day Tea Party at Upper Senate Park next to the Capitol Building.  This time, I was able to get a fuller view of the movement by seeing the behind-the-scenes organization and talking with the other speakers.

Since April of 2009 people have been gathering around the country to attend “tea parties”. At these rallies, ordinary citizens, democrat, republican, or other are able to register their displeasure with the way their country is being run.

If you attended the Independence day tea party in Washington, DC this past Saturday, you would have noted by the 2000-strong attendance that moment hasn’t slowed, angry hasn’t been quelled, and the citizens appetite for change has yet to be sated.

Among the sea of Gadsden flags, there were signs depicting the varying shades of ire among the attendees “Say no to knee-cap-and-trade,” “Obama: Tax Terrorist,” “give me my rights you keep the change,” “Palin 2012,” The Ron Paul folks were out in force, as were veterans and religious groups. Parents brought children, little old ladies gave out cookies. There were even vendors selling Gadsden flags for $5 a pop: ah, capitalism.

And though there was a quaint, almost county-fair atmosphere, there was also a distinct tension among the crowd. Perhaps the movement’s biggest asset is it’s greatest weakness: the issue it centers on is an undefined anger about “the way things are going”.

After I delivered my speech I wandered through the crowd, speaking with a number of party-goers. Some friends in the audience recounted how my suggestion to read Atlas Shrugged as a way to understand the thinking that led us from 1776 to today had sparked a mini-argument between two audience members. A little old lady thanked me for that same reference. One middle-aged gentleman pulled me aside and spoke to me as if we were co-conspirators. “Why hasn’t anyone centralized the movement yet? We could be so much more effective if we got organized,” he stressed, as if I was the one to organize the group.

My reply was simply that as a decentralized, grass-roots movement, the principles among the attendees and their specific targets of ire are too disparate to really form a cohesive political party. Most want a limited government and less spending; just how little, and how much less are issues that the group doesn’t seem to agree on.

The way the tea party movement can be leveraged into real action is by targeting specific issues in order to put immediate pressure on those in congress. But we can only force real change by forcing politicians to stick to certain principles—and unfortunately, not all tea party-goers share the same principles. One example: after having an agreeable conversation with a woman at the event about how government intervention was getting in the way of an individual’s right to make his or her own choices, we ended up fighting about marijuana legalization. Rumor had it that a pot-legalization protest was happening just around the corner and I joked that we should join forces and invite them to our rally. The woman shook her head violently. “That’s a bad idea–we don’t want them,” she said, seemingly shocked to find that I wasn’t of the same mind on the issue. I saw the two protests as intimately linked ideologically (or at least, I believed they should be). The tea party movement is about liberty and, in essence, so is the drug legalization movement. When I asked the woman to explain, she rationalized that certain drugs should be illegal because they caused violence and poverty in other South and Central American countries.  I tried to explain the practical argument for legalizing drugs, reducing the cost and eliminating the criminality would eliminate most of the cartels. Then I tried explaining that if she truly wanted government to stay out of her life and protect her liberty, she would have to extend the same principle to her neighbors—even if she didn’t like what they chose to do with their own lives. She wasn’t listening to me anymore though, she wasn’t interested.

Another big DC tea party is planned to take place on 9/12. And while I do hope the momentum continues to pick up, the rallies will have little lasting effects unless the party-goers accept the principle that if you want a small government and you want to make your own choices, that means you have to accept the lawful decisions of your neighbors, whether you like them or not.

For those interested, I have the text of the speech I delivered. (The actual delivery is a little different and was cut short due to time-constraints).

Happy Independence Day. Wow there sure are a lot of you here. I think the right-wing conspiracy that pays for us all to come to these parties might just go bankrupt after today.

Is there really a better day to protest an out of control government than on the anniversary of the day the founders did the same thing over 200 years ago?

It is my hope that someday our descendants will look back at today and think of it as the day Americans re-declared their independence.

To make such a declaration we need to understand, as the founders understood, what it truly means to be independent.

At the original Boston Tea Party, the colonists didn’t protest the Tea Act because of high costs, tax increases, or even taxation without representation. In reality, the act actually reduced the price of tea in the states. Before the act the East India Trading Company was struggling to sell its merchandise in America, but the British government—many of whom had a stake in the company gave it special privileges and penalized its competition; essentially giving the East India Company a tea bailout.

But the colonists saw it for what it was—a pay off—and threw it into the harbor.

They weren’t just resisting the tax, government spending, or government intervention, they rejected the very idea that government’s role should be as a master over slaves that exist only by its allowance.

No! The founders said. They did not see themselves as cattle or slaves who needed permission to live from any man or any government. And they were willing to risk their lives and wealth to reject that idea of humanity. But they weren’t just fighting against something, they were fighting for something: They were fighting for their ideal of humanity as individuals who have a right to exist—not because anyone gave them permission—but by virtue of being human. From years struggling on farms and in towns across the newly formed America the founders had a clear understanding that human life required the ability to make one’s own decisions for the purpose of one’s own life and happiness. Without these rights one can’t be truly independent.

This ideal of humanity led the founders to create a document that changed the world forever. The declaration of independence was a radical statement, proclaiming that humans are endowed with the inalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now, you’re going to hear that phrase a lot today, but really think about those words. Inalienable that means that these rights cannot be taken away without removing what it is to be human. And the rights it names are specific and carefully worded: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—not the guarantee of happiness. It says that the protection of these rights is the ONLY reason that governments are instituted among men—to protect them from anyone or anything that tries to tread on them.

The founders knew these rights are fundamental to the existence of human life and the only reason for a government is to guard them. What then if a government stops protecting them—should we just ignore it? Should we go on living as slaves under its rule? Or, should we do something about it?

When the founders looked around them they saw what I see: teachers, builders, inventors, all struggling with their own private challenges and achieving their own successes. They did not see weak, begging children in need of a Mother England or an Uncle Sam to tell them how to survive. All they needed was the liberty to live their own lives—and they would have nothing less. Their ideal of humanity was of strong, brave, and wise individuals and as a result they created the best country in the world.

Now, when I say that, I’m not being nationalistic.Though the principles laid out in the declaration weren’t executed perfectly, America was still the first country to recognize that individual rights are the basis for a just society. This shining beacon of liberty attracted the greatest minds and most industrious people from all over the world. And America quickly became the leader in business, science, and medicine.

Something has definitely changed over the last two centuries. While in some ways, we have moved closer to the ideals of individual rights by strengthening the principles in the declaration—such as abolishing slavery, giving women the vote, and doing away with Jim Crow laws for example. But overall, we have moved far, very far away from the ideal of a government that’s sole purpose is the protection of individual life, liberty, and the ability for individuals to pursue their own happiness. At some point they started believing the role of government was to support lives, and to provide happiness, homes, successful businesses, and medical care. And it was at that point the government stopped serving us and started exploiting us.

It didn’t happen overnight. It happened by a process of chipping away over 200 years at the principles laid out by founders. The first time someone demanded that government give them anything other than protection for their rights. Because nothing is free: for the government to give, it must first take.

The first time a bureaucrat said everyone has a right to eat in a smoke-free restaurant and took away the restaurant owners right to run his business as he saw fit. The first time someone declared it was government’s purpose to provide social welfare and took your right to keep your whole paycheck. The first time the FDA said its purpose was to protect you from bad drugs and took away your right to choose your own course of treatment. When it from one citizen to give to another or one business to subsidize another, these were the first steps that began to shift government from the obedient protector to the meddling parent. And every step was justified in the name of the ‘public good’.

WHY DID IT HAPPEN?

The reason we didn’t stand up in each instance and shout NO! was because we didn’t understand the full meaning of independence. It is not just a state of being free from tyranny, it is the condition of living ones own life for oneself without demanding the help or sacrifice of anyone else.

When those in power asserted their right to steal from us, they did so in the name of public welfare. To help the needy, unable, and to protect us from ourselves. By this justification government heaped regulations on employers to protect workers, meddled in businesses to prevent greedy corporations from taking advantage of consumers, took money from the wealthy to redistribute to the poor. At the core of this justification is the assertion that we are not independent, but interdependent, the assertion that we are our brothers keepers and if one fails, we all fail.

Based on this principle—the principle that government’s role is to provide for public welfare, it’s powers are virtually limitless and ever expanding.

A few examples.

When the department of agriculture was founded in 1839 it had a budget of $1000 to so it could collect statistics. Today, with a budget over $96 billion and it does everything from regulating land-use, to controlling food prices—forcing us to pay farmers to charge higher prices for food!

The FDA which was formally establish in 1906 to simply monitor drug safety now holds pharmaceutical companies by the neck, requiring hoop jumping to such a degree that the length of time before a newly created drug becomes available is increased sometime by years, the cost significantly increased, and the number of drugs available significantly reduced.

Lately we’ve seen some audacious federal projects that barely pretend to serve a needed public purpose: a bike library for one town in Colorado, hundreds of thousands given to the lobster institute, over half a million given to help the homeless problem in a town in New York –a town that says it has no homeless problem.

But it isn’t just about money. While a lot of freedoms have been given to Americans, government has ever increased its presence in our lives and ever decision.

In short these regulations have squelched our ability to choose how we conduct the business of our lives. Companies can’t offer the goods and services we want, and we can’t purchase the items that would improve our lives.

The maze of rules, fines, and tax breaks, created the incentives for businesses to make decisions not based on what consumers or customers want, but how it can best navigate the ocean of regulations. Now government agents have the audacity to say that capitalism has failed and that we must have more government intervention for society’s own good.

To quote the author and philosopher Ayn Rand: “One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary”. She said that in 1975 and by the way, if you want to understand the thinking that led us from 1776 to today, you should read her novel Atlas Shrugged.

Let me be clear, our problems aren’t simply economic. Butf the only economic system that defends the rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness is laissez-faire capitalism.

The picture may look gloomy now, but there is a bright side. We already know that to throw off the chains of tyranny we just need to do as the founders did; assert our rights to pursue our life, liberty, and our own individual happiness. Not our neighbor’s happiness and not happiness as defined by a university professor or a bureaucrat in Washington—Our own personal happiness.

Today we can stand up and say we’re not going to sell out our freedom. We don’t need the government to save us from ourselves—we need government prevent force, outlaw fraud, protect liberty, and leave us free!

Today we can stand up and say we’re not going to take any deal that offers us empty promises in exchange for our rights. As I have said, like the original tea party these modern protests aren’t about bailouts, taxes, or even government intervention. It is about what all those things imply. It is about our inalienable right to make choices about our own lives, and property, for our own happiness and the demand for a government that protects our ability to live free and independent lives.

Thank you.

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