What the Tea Party Movement is really about

Glenn Reynolds links two short, easy-to understand pieces. From the New Ledger:

I can’t turn around without reading something new about how the Tea Party is the 10-20 percent marginalized rump of Rush Limbaugh listeners who want to keep the government from making life better in every way. Most commenters dismiss the TP as a nuisance deserving only to be ignored. Some go a little farther. David Brooks fears the TP because, as he notes, some TPers are independents, not Republicans, and their few percentage points are enough to swing lots of elections. Noam Chomsky fears the TP because he sees in it the germ of an American Nazi party that is only waiting for its charismatic Hitler to emerge and destroy the world with military power that, unlike Germany’s in 1939, is unchallengeable.

Here’s what the TP itself really fears, in an inchoate way that for most of its members doesn’t rise to the level of clear understanding, but is still intuitively very powerful: the US is embracing central planning as a governing theory, as fast as our legislative processes will allow.

Central planning has a long record of failure, but Americans have always believed that we know how to succeed where others can’t. That leads to the hubris of people like Barack Obama, who says “YES WE CAN! . . . .

Central planning has two primary flaws, when compared with economic freedom: it misallocates resources, and it magnifies the impact of corruption. . . . .

The endpoint of central planning, if not outright failure, is a much deeper and more intractable division of society into haves and have-nots. After promising a better world for everyone, the progressives will end up creating a society that is more polarized than ever.

Keep this firmly in mind, because you’ll see it first in stories that middle-income people are somehow having more and more trouble just affording the necessities of life. This is an unstoppable treadmill leading downward. . . .

And we’re already seeing everywhere, from David Brooks to Noam Chomsky, the signs of how the elites will have to deal with the polarization: by loudly proclaiming in their captive media that the have-nots are stupid and, eventually, evil.

From Hot Air:

What is money? It’s a medium of exchange – you use it to make purchases. To the average individual, money is also a means of cooperation. It transforms the value of your labor into a very efficient form of communication. . .

What is value? It’s more than just the number on a price tag. If you look around your home, you’ll find many objects with value that far exceeds their price: treasured heirlooms, gifts from your children, mass-produced artwork that you happen to like. Value is subjective… which means, in essence, it’s a function of choice. . . .

What is power? It is the ability to impose your will upon others. Power requires compulsion, which can range from a mild set of incentives through absolute domination. Your best friends might be willing to honor almost any of your requests, but you don’t really have power over them. . . .

In a constitutional republic, our elected government is meant to be the exclusive concentration of legitimate power. By definition, the amount of power exercised by the government increases as it grows larger. Power is compulsion – fines, subsidies, regulations, and imprisonment. More power means less freedom. Reduced freedom means less value. As money is drained away from free citizens, their ability to cooperate voluntarily is reduced… and only voluntary cooperation produces genuine value.

This is the dreadful equation of socialism. Money can be used to create value, or it can fuel the exercise of power, but not both. You can see this happening around you, right now. It has happened everywhere in the world, every time central planning has been tried. It would happen even if politicians were the selfless, compassionate, disciplined civil servants they claim to be. . . .

I believe that the ideas in these two pieces are very important. Please consider them as they relate to current political developments.