House of Eratosthenes

Randall Hoven, writing at American Thinker, comes up with a list of events & issues about history showing the Tea Party to be on the right side — whether people are paying attention or not. It is an impressive list, longer than I think a lot of people would imagine it to be.

I expect they are going to continue to be right, so long as they keep the platform narrow and reasonable, because the point they’re trying to make is one that human events are always going to support: Robbing Peter to pay Paul, as they say, makes for a sore Peter. It makes for a situation in which Paul must be expected to do a lot more of whatever it is Paul was doing, and Peter will do a lot less of whatever it is Peter was doing. This is the way people are built; we respond to incentive; so this isn’t going to change.

The list is endless. If you were thinking of starting a business or making an investment that might not pay off for five or ten years, would you feel like you know the rules and could depend on them? No, you’d hunker down, which is exactly what everyone with any money left is doing right now.

This jobless recovery is not some mystery. It is very clearly the result of decisions — decisions made by Obama and the Democrats. At every opportunity they grew government, shrank the private sector, and viewed budding enterprises as little more than beasts of burden — something to whip while healthy and carve up and eat when not.

As Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms, Obama views corporations not yet in Chapter 11.

Nothing Democrats did helped; everything they did hurt. Everything. Min wage. TARP. Stimulus. ObamaCare. The Gulf oil spill. Every budget they ever proposed, written or not. Every little czar they put in place to spend other people’s money and to bully the only productive people still toiling away at the thankless tasks of making stuff and providing jobs.

At every point, the Tea Party and its sympathizers tried to stop these idiocies, only to be called ignorant racists.

But whether or not the Tea Party is right, is only half the issue. The other half, perhaps more important, is how we as a nation are going about conducting the argument.

Everything you can do to botch an experiment, we’re doing. First thing we did was elect minority tokens to represent the way the lefties think our economy should work: Woman as House Speaker and black guy as President. These are improvements, for sure, on some level since it does us no credit to have big long uninterrupted lines of white dudes in these offices going all the way back to the founding of the nation. If that was the only point to it, I’d have no problem — but it isn’t. The tokens were put there to sell things. You can only say nice things about Speaker Pelosi or else you’re a sexist; can’t disagree with President Obama or else you’re a racist. That was the point. President Obama was positioned where He was positioned, and put where He was put, to sell things that otherwise could not be sold. And that’s not just an observation about His skin color, it’s everything about Him. His sex appeal, His speaking style, all the charming superlatives that His admirers will define and a whole lot more that they won’t. Not a single one of these embellishments have anything to do with making anything better, unless you happen to have something to gain by Barack Obama winning an argument. That, as I’ve written many times before, is His only contribution: Selling crap that shouldn’t be sold.

We engage “these idiocies” as Hoven calls them, one after another, each time without waiting to see how any of the previous idiocies have worked out. That thwarts a whole lot more than simply observing that perhaps they’re not a good idea; had any of them worked, but with caveats, there would be opportunities to improve. Can’t do that either. So that’s another thing we did wrong.

The scope is universal. Everything has to be enacted sea to shining sea. Freedom must yield, nobody outside Washington can choose anything. Also, once the idiocy is tried, it has to enjoy the benefit of maximum impact. So everyone has to be affected and nobody can be allowed to get away from it. That’s necessary, of course, because some of the people involved are viewed the same way Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms; so who would participate voluntarily in such a role?

So to me, the insults flung at the Tea Party — by people who plainly aren’t looking at the facts, not monitoring how the evidence is shaping up to appear in columns like Hoven’s — are just icing on the cake, a final layer of national wrongdoing. We’re having a discussion that I think is worthy enough, if we were to have it reasonably: Should the government step in after the free market has determined who-gets-what, and rearrange the results to make them more fair? But “reasonably” is the key word. If we were to have that discussion reasonably it would be a short one. So we break — every — single — rule — we possibly can. Choose minorities to present one school of thought, just so anybody who shows any resistance can be called a racist. Put Washington in charge of everything. Never wait to see how anything works before trying the next thing, just slam ’em in. No test beds allowed, completely out of the question, federalize everything, expand the scope all across the fruited plain, make everything compulsory and don’t allow anything to be voluntary.

That way, there’s no control to the experiment. The results can be as dismal as you can possibly imagine, and at the end of it you get to say “Yeah but who knows what could’ve happened if we didn’t do it. Better agree with me about that or else you’re racist.”

But it only works on people who don’t pay attention. Yes that is a super-majority, to be sure…but as the economy continues to sour, the silver lining in the cloud is that people are given incentive to pay closer attention. That popular yard sign in circulation right now, “If you voted for Obama in ’08 to prove you’re not a racist, you need to vote for someone else in ’12 to prove you’re not an idiot,” is becoming sadly persuasive. Sixty-five percent of Americans now disapprove of the President’s economic policies; the “do what I say or else you’re a racist” glue is not holding up the wallpaper.

What this all comes down to, is that there is a reason we’re hearing the Tea Party people are crazy: They’ve spoken out about a public issue, which automatically means they have to have enemies. And those enemies have no place else to go other than slander. That’s the bottom of their barrel now, and they’re scraping it. There’s a referendum taking place here and it’s on something much, much bigger than President Obama or His skin. We’re having a referendum on whether the right to private property is higher than political demagoguery, or whether political demagoguery can trump the God-given right to property. Even though the experiment’s been done all wrong, the verdict that is being delivered, unmarred and unsullied — you certainly can’t argue Obama’s way hasn’t been given a fair shake — is that the right to property must win or else civilization cannot endure. You can’t get the bills paid, with your “sore Peters,” that is, if the people paying the bills are to be treated as evil, attacked for doing what they do, discouraged from continuing to do it.

So to me, the insults flung at the Tea Party — by people who plainly aren’t looking at the facts, not monitoring how the evidence is shaping up to appear in columns like Hoven’s

They’re too busy gawking at Charlotte’s Web
- philmon | 09/01/2011 @ 19:58
SOME folks, that have never met me, call me racist and sexist. The’lly even imply that I engage in sexism and racism. Make no mistake, I DO engage in discrimination, day in, day out.
Whatcha gonna do about it?
I’m ALSO willing to abide by The Constitution, as written. Affirmative “Action”, as written. Title IX, as written. Generally, I’ll even enter into a “contract” with spit and a handshake.
Whatcha gonna d…..

Ooooo…NOW I get it.
Um, if I’m ever tried and convicted of felony level proclaimed racism/sexism/contra disparate impactism , at great expense, do I lose my right to…um…democratically vote? Free travel? Security in my person and papers? Free association? Self/others protection?
- CaptDMO | 09/04/2011 @ 11:07

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“Tea Party, Right About Everything”Thursday, September 1st, 2011

“Tea Party, Right About Everything”
Thursday, September 1st, 2011