Tag: Tea Party

Socialism at Jamestown

By
David Boaz

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank chides Dick Armey today for having said that socialism caused starvation at Jamestown.  “Who knew they had socialists in 1607?” Milbank asks.

Actually, lots of people know this. As I wrote three years ago:

Four hundred years ago today 105 men and boys disembarked from three ships and established the first permanent English settlement in North America. They built a fort along what they called the James River, in honor of their king.

The land was lush and fertile, yet within three years most of the colonists died during what came to be known as “the starving time.” Only the establishment of private property saved the Jamestown colony.

What went wrong? There were the usual hardships of pioneers far from home, such as unfamiliar diseases. There were mixed relations with the Indians already living in Virginia. Sometimes the Indians and settlers traded, other times armed conflicts broke out. But according to a governor of the colony, George Percy, most of the colonists died of famine, despite the “good and fruitful” soil, the abundant deer and turkey, and the “strawberries, raspberries and fruits unknown” growing wild.

The problem was the lack of private property. As Tom Bethell writes in his book The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages, “The colonists were indolent because most of them were indentured servants, expected to toil for seven years and contribute the fruits of their labor to the common store.”

Understandably, men who don’t benefit from their hard work tend not to work very hard.

But a new governor arrived and instituted a system of private property.

And then, the Virginia historian Matthew Page Andrews wrote, “As soon as the settlers were thrown upon their own resources, and each freeman had acquired the right of owning property, the colonists quickly developed what became the distinguishing characteristic of Americans – an aptitude for all kinds of craftsmanship coupled with an innate genius for experimentation and invention.”

John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, said that once private property was instituted, men could engage in “gathering and reaping the fruits of their labors with much joy and comfort.”

I gotta go with Milbank, not Armey, though, on another point of contention: Alexander Hamilton was a big-government man. At least by the standards of 1787; no doubt he’d be appalled at the size, scope, and power of today’s federal government, though he might approve the imperial trappings and authority of modern presidents.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

Tuesday Links

  • “Snowmageddon!” If you’ve been watching the news, recent snow storms both prove and disprove global warming, depending on who you talk to. According to Pat Michaels, both sides are wrong: “The fact of the matter is that global warming simply hasn’t done a darned thing to Washington’s snow. The planet was nearly a degree (Celsius) cooler in 1899, when the previous record was set. If you plot out year-to-year snow around here, you’ll see no trend whatsoever through the entire history.”
Topics: 
Cato Publications, Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Political Philosophy

Stimulus Hypocrisy and the Tea Partiers

By
Tad DeHaven

The Washington Times recently used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain letters sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture by numerous Republican lawmakers seeking stimulus money for their constituents. All of these Republicans had publicly criticized the stimulus and voted against it.

Georgia Rep. John Linder wrote on his website in October that recent unemployment figures “only reinforce the fact that the $787 billion ‘stimulus’ signed into law eight months ago has done nothing for job growth in this country.” But just two weeks earlier the congressman had sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on behalf of a foundation in his district seeking stimulus funds in which he claimed “the employment opportunities created by this [foundation’s] program would be quickly utilized.”

Remember South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson who infamously shouted “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech to Congress in September? Here’s what he had to say in a letter to Secretary Vilsack on behalf of a foundation in his district:

“We know their endeavor will provide jobs and investment in one of the poorer sections of the Congressional District.”

According to his spokeswoman, Rep. Wilson opposed the stimulus as a “misguided spending bill,” but wanted to make sure his constituents “receive their share of the pie.” That’s pretty much the same excuse the rest of the GOP lawmakers gave: the stimulus is bad but my constituents deserve their “fair share.”

So much for principles.

Speaking of principles, it’s stories like this that should give the burgeoning Tea Party movement pause before getting too close to GOP politicians. I spoke to a newly formed group of a hundred or so tea partiers in southern Indiana back in December. The vast majority was concerned about Washington’s spending addiction and Beltway encroachment on their lives. In the two hours I fielded questions, only one brought up illegal immigration and nobody brought up Obama’s birth certificate. They weren’t worried about Muslims and gays – they were worried about what the mounting federal debt meant for their children and grandchildren’s future.

Therefore it was disconcerting to read that the organizers of this past weekend’s Tea Party Convention in Nashville brought in Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin to speak. Tancredo’s agenda was typically nasty and counterproductive, while Palin’s combined her formulated hockey mom shtick with a sophomoric jingoism that should have appalled devotees of limited government. Yet, according to the video of her speech, the crowd loved it.

Instead of spending $100,000 on Palin, I suggest Tea Party organizers bring in my colleague John Samples to speak at the next convention. (John’s worth $100,000 but can be had for considerably less.) John recently wrote a column, entitled “Tea Partiers Shouldn’t Date the GOP,” that every budding tea partier should read.

Here’s an excerpt:

The quality that gives the Tea Party movement its legitimacy is that it is so fundamentally illegitimate: outside the establishment, bereft of representation on K Street, and without an identifiable face to speak for it on Meet the Press. This is a movement that sprang deep from within the viscera of America, not from some political poll or focus group.

It is not Republican; it is not even conservative. It has no interest in debating the merits of No Child Left Behind, abstinence-only sex education or George W. Bush’s rationale for going to Iraq. Replacing a “spend and borrow” Democrat with a “spend and borrow” Republican is not the goal of the Tea Party movement.

This movement is simply saying: “We are fine without you, Washington. Now for the love of God, go attend a reception somewhere, and stop making health care and entrepreneurship more expensive than they already are.”

I hope John’s right because if the movement allows itself to become entangled with the same party that publicly eschews big government stimulus while groveling behind the scenes for a piece of it, the [Tea] party will be over.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

A Time for Less Government?

By
Doug Bandow

The public is unhappy with government.  How could it be otherwise, given the mess our governors have made?  Reports the Washington Post:

Two-thirds of Americans are “dissatisfied” or downright “angry” about the way the federal government is working, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. On average, the public estimates that 53 cents of every tax dollar they send to Washington is “wasted.”

Despite the disapproval of government, few Americans say they know much about the “tea party” movement, which emerged last year and attracted voters angry at a government they thought was spending recklessly and overstepping its constitutional powers. And the new poll shows that the political standing of former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who was the keynote speaker last week at the first National Tea Party Convention, has deteriorated significantly.

The opening is clear: Public dissatisfaction with how Washington operates is at its highest level in Post-ABC polling in more than a decade – since the months after the Republican-led government shutdown in 1996 – and negative ratings of the two major parties hover near record highs.

Surely this is a moment for a true political entrepreneur, someone who believes in liberty–across the board–willing to challenge Washington’s bipartisan consensus that government should grow ever bigger and more expensive.  Someone who opposes expensive, and often deadly, social engineering at home and abroad.  Someone willing to simply leave the American people alone, rather than determined to conscript them into yet another annoying, intrusive, and expensive national crusade.  Someone willing to back up his or her rhetoric about individual liberty with action.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

The Tea Party Comes Home

By
Roger Pilon

Today, Politico Arena asks:

The message from Massachusetts

What now for the Democratic agenda?

My response:

Listening to Scott Brown’s long, barely scripted acceptance speech last night, you had the refreshing sense that you were listening to an ordinary American, not to some political cut-out.  Here’s a guy who campaigned in a pick-up truck with over 200,000 miles on the odometer, who listened to the voters and understood that they wanted not simply to block tax hikes but to lower taxes (and the last thing they wanted was for their taxes to pay terrorists’ lawyers bills!), who understood that even worse than the health care bill now before Congress were the back-room deals that brought it about, who’s served proudly for 30 years in the National Guard – in short, here’s guy you’d be comfortable having a beer with because, as he said, “I know who I am and I know who I serve.”

Which brings to mind the famous Rose Garden beer the president and vice president shared with Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley – speaking of (dis)comfort.  And that brings to mind Cambridge, which stayed true blue, 84-15, Walter Russell Mead informs us this morning in his delightfully tongue-in-cheek Arena post.  (“First, some good news for Democrats: the base is secure.”)  As goes Harvard, so goes Berkeley.

But to today’s Arena question.  The Democratic left is predictably outraged that “the people” they so love in the abstract have so disappointed them in the concrete.  Exhibit A is last night’s Arena post by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel.  Railing against “the Tea Party’s inchoate right-wing populism” (if it’s infested Massachusetts, shudder to think of it in Idaho!), Katrina tells Obama to “get tough, get bold, kiss ‘post-partisanship’ goodbye,” and “put yourself squarely back on the side of working people” by “passing the strongest possible healthcare bill as quickly as is feasible.”  And there’s the cliff, Katrina.

Lanny Davis has more sober advice for Obama in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.  To those who are pointing fingers at Martha Coakley, Lanny says, “This was a defeat not of the messenger but of the message” – the unrelenting leftism that has come from this White House and this Congress.  And he points, by way of instruction, to Bill Clinton’s response to the disastrous elections of 1994, though he doesn’t mention Clinton’s ringing, albeit inaccurate, description of his course-change – “The era of big government is over.”  Is it in Obama’s DNA to make such a course correction?  Does he have a reset button?

On health care, Obama and his party are in an almost impossible situation.  If they press ahead, as Nancy Pelosi and others are urging, the cliff awaits them in November.  But if they abandon their project, what will they run on in November?  It’s a mess of their own making, of course, so completely did they misread the election of 2008.  What better evidence of the endurance of principles of sound, limited government that some two centuries later, The Tea Party has come home to Boston.

Topics: 
Government and Politics

Tuesday Links

  • Gene Healy on today’s election in Massachusetts: “If Republican Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts special election Tuesday, the Bay State will have its first GOP senator since the era when disco was king. And Brown will have the much-derided Tea Party legions to thank.”
  • George W. Obama? “Bush’s successor—who actually taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago—is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the international treaties we’ve signed.”
  • Podcast: “Our America Initiative” featuring former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. Johnson discusses out of control government spending, immigration, the Bush years, the drug war, defense policy and more.
Topics: 
Cato Publications, General

Libertarian Surge

By
David Boaz

David Paul Kuhn at RealClearPolitics sees a surge of libertarianism in the current political scene:

The philosophical casualty of the Great Recession was supposed to be libertarianism. But signs to the contrary are thriving.

Americans are increasingly opposed to activist government programs. The most significant social movement of 2009, the Tea Party protests, grew out of that opposition. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand is as popular today as ever. Rand’s brilliant and radical laissez faire novel “Atlas Shrugged,” sold roughly 300,000 copies last year, according to BookScan, twice its sales in 2008 and roughly triple annual sales in recent decades.

We are witnessing a conservative libertarian comeback. It’s an oppositional advance, a response to all manners of active-state liberalism since the financial crisis. It’s a pervasive feeling of invasiveness. The factional bastions of traditional libertarianism, like Washington think tank Cato, now have an intangible and awkward alliance with a broad swath of the American electorate….

This limited libertarian resurgence has haunted Obama’s domestic agenda. The fundamental mistake of the Obama administration in 2009 was underestimating the American public’s ongoing tension with active-state liberalism, a fact visible from the outset and one only belatedly confronted by Obama….

Today’s limited libertarian revival is a response to a sense of overreaching elite technocrats as well as fear of an intrusive bureaucracy. Responsiveness is the core impulse. Rand’s radical libertarianism, where man is an ends in himself and the welfare state is fundamentally immoral, was a response to the radically invasive Soviet state that weaned her as a girl. On a drastically less extreme scale, one side of this American debate could not exist without the other. The Obama administration brought with it ambitions of a resurgence of FDR and LBJ’s active-state liberalism. And with it, Obama has revived the enduring American challenge to the state.

I’ve been struck by the fact that two recent profiles in the New York Times magazine — one on Dick Armey and one on the rise of Marco Rubio in Florida — have identified Tea Party protesters as libertarians, which I think is largely right but not generally noticed by pundits who can only hold two concepts (red and blue, conservative and liberal) in their minds at once. It’s not that the Tea Partiers are carrying pro-choice or anti–drug war signs, it’s just that their focus and their energy are, as the Armey profile put it, “libertarian, anti-Washington, old-fashioned get-out-of-my-way-and-I’ll-make-it-on-my-own American self-sufficiency.” They’re up in arms about spending, deficits, bailouts, government handouts, and a government takeover of health care. That’s a populist libertarian spirit.

Kuhn describes the current mood as “conservative libertarianism,” which he contrasts to “traditional libertarianism” that embraces a laissez-faire approach to both economics and personal freedom. He may be right that a lot of the Tea Partiers are not as comprehensively pro-freedom or “anti-government” (really, pro-limited government) as I’d like. But I see some evidence of a social libertarian surge as well, as I wrote back in May. Polls are finding growing support for marijuana legalization and for marriage equality, especially among young people. As young people and independents also become increasingly disillusioned with President Obama’s big-government agenda, this may be a real shift in a libertarian direction. And don’t forget, at 90 days into the Obama administration, Americans preferred smaller government to “more active government” by 66 to 25 percent.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

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