Tea Party

About the Tea Party, Let’s Get One Thing Straight Here

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Tea Party Patriots Mission Statement and Core Values

 
Mission Statement
 
The impetus for the Tea Party movement is excessive government spending and taxation. Our mission is to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets.
 
Core Values
 
* Fiscal Responsibility
* Constitutionally Limited Government
* Free Markets
 

The Tea Party is about these core values. Other issues, however worthy they may be, have their own advocates and their own place.

Do not be fooled by the propaganda.

Iain Murray, Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You

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Iain Murray, in his excellent new book, takes the reader on a tour through the sprawling, wasteful, oppressive and destructive mess that we are all paying for upon pain of imprisonment.

Most readers of this blog are of a conservative or libertarian disposition already. Our inclination is to see the government, as presently constituted, as a ruinous burden on the economy, and a noxious growth choking out our freedom and our future prospects. Iain Murray’s book provides facts and evidence, and many anecdotes, demonstrating the accuracy of this view. If anything, by the detail and specificity of his depiction, he shows that things are worse than I thought, which is an achievement.

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Quote of the Day

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Leo Linbeck III, from a comment he left in response to this post at Belmont Club:

The good news is that we can fix our nation’s problems. How? Well, the first step is to reverse this trend toward centralization and scale. We have to stop concentrating power, and start dispersing it. Corruption and regulatory overreach are political pollution, and the solution to pollution is dilution.
 
And, believe it or not, voters in both parties support the idea of moving decision-making closer to the people. Republicans call this “federalism,” and Democrats call this “local control.”
 
The media tries to divide us, but we’re really together on the need to move money and decision-making closer to the people. The Ruling Elite don’t want this to happen, of course, so they try to convince us that we are enemies of each other. Don’t believe it.
 
Yes, we disagree on policy. But we agree on governance, we believe in self-governance, and it is the current governance system that is broken.
 
There is lots of room for disagreement and political fights. But those fights must be engaged at the local level, because they’re the only level at which we can come to consensus. The problems are literally unsolvable at the federal level.

The genius of the Tea Party lies in its emergent ability to concentrate voter attention on a common political denominator of core public-finance issues.

Humor as we slouch toward. . .

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An entertaining aspect of Perry’s entry has been commentary explaining Aggies (even in Texas, one says, Aggies are considered hicks;yuh think). As the t-sips describe the yell leaders and Aggies boast of National Merit scholars, true outsiders may not realize the Corps was compulsory for much of its first century. Today Perry was ably (or at least energetically) commended by a t-sipper (Plan 2) and poliltical rival. Perry’s a mensch Kinky Friedman concludes. Friedman’s style is discursive; he never edits a good one-liner. And he acknowledges that at this point he’d choose Charlie Sheen over Obama. Still the piece is affectionate and, in the end, forceful: “A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.” (With Kinky irony & sentiment are often paired.)

Mark Steyn, too, is a nail that hasn’t been hammered down – he, too, argues “that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats.” (It’s about an hour.) He, too, sometimes sacrifices coherence for humor. But, in the end, his arguments for human rights and self-reliance, the core of After America, have a steady aim. His historical context is not the southwest but northeast; he chose the granite state and citizenship. And Steyn reminds us why someone – someone who thinks and someone who is a nail too stubborn to be hammered down – would choose what we too long took for granted.