Surviving the Tea Party

I would like to think that the Tea Party is like a festered blister and if properly treated--not enabled--it will shrink and go away after time. If the Republicans find themselves held hostage by the TP it is their fault.
The TP says (from their web site:http://theteaparty.net )

"The Tea Party movement is a grassroots movement of millions of like-minded Americans from all backgrounds and political parties. Tea Party members share similar core principles supporting the United States Constitution as the Founders intended, such as:

•  Limited federal government
•  Individual freedoms
•  Personal responsibility
•  Free markets
•  Returning political power to the states and the people

As a movement, The Tea Party is not a political party nor is looking to form a third political party any time soon. The Tea Party movement, is instead, about reforming all political parties and government so that the core principles of our Founding Fathers become, once again, the foundation upon which America stands."

But. . . . . .! 

I agree with the Founding Fathers  who (Thomas Jefferson) strongly recommended limited government

(not all of them agreed to this principle)

.  However, if you read the writing of several of these men they did not necessarily favor semi-autonomous states. Instead they strongly favored the idea of individual states that could manage certain needs of the citizens while at the same time presenting a strong united front: thus the Name The United States. Limited government had it's place in a simple world of thirteen states and a population of about 3 million people. The first census (1790) reported a population of: 3,348, 458 (in the thirteen original states) which did not include blacks, Native Americans, and depending on who was taking the census and where, women.This figure is just slightly less than the 2010 Census that reported about 3.8 million people inside the city limits of Los Angeles CA. Presumably this figure did include those excluded in the first census in 1790. 

Our population is close to 300 million and many of the fifty states have proven that they can not manage a broad spectrum of programs. Some of these states are very close to default. Government can be "fixed" as I've written in other blog entries. But the words efficiency and effectiveness do not form a nice tight package., Indeed they do not belong in the same package. Government and businesses centralize for efficiency and decentralize for effectiveness. The idea that some of the Founding Fathers had was that the federal government would manage the larger pieces of government to more efficiently distribute funding and support and that the individual states would manage these programs for effectiveness, because application of the funds would be closer to where individual needs reside. 

The current opportunity for efficiency and effectiveness in government is to close the holes I've written about that bleed national programs so badly that when the anemic flows do reach the states (that further bleed these programs) there is not enough to meet the needs of all of those people that need the help. 

Individual freedoms are nice to talk about but given the core question in Zero Sum--what is in my best interest--impossible to implement at least in a broad sense. Again it is the issue of a huge population. Much of what we do on a daily basis must have some regulation. How much is to much? That indeed is the question. 

I readily and wholeheartedly  agree with the idea of personal responsibility but again given zero sum many people do not have the same definition of responsibility that I have. As a consequence my taxes and insurance premiums (to name just a couple) are higher that they should be. In my world I would say: you can choose not to wear your seat belt or ride your bicycle without a helmet, but if you get killed not following these concepts (one a law and the other a strong suggestion) then I do not want to be penalized for your stupidity and poor choices. I do not want to be charged "my share" of your emergency room expenses. Let that burden be placed on you and your family. Would the TP support this? Probably until one of them had to pay their own way and then they would want shared liability!! What about abortion or gay marriage? Does a woman have the right to choose in the TP world? I don't think so!!! Shared costs, liability and responsibility form the core values of socialism! Oh my!

The concept of free market has always been a myth! IF the market and business were not controlled by just a few people (globally) it would work quite well. It can and does work at a local level but that is why you pay more for organic carrots at the farmers market than you do at the local natural food store or the chain grocery.

The TP stands for all of these things but only within certain sideboards. Again does it include the rights of individual Americans to make all of their own choices even if they ensure society that they will accept all costs and personal responsibility? NO! The world that the TP promotes is an idealistic picture of what might have worked in the thirteen original colonies but only for a while. Big government sucks and is very inefficient at best but it does try to manage zero sum in the interests of the people. 

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