GOP Vs. Tea Party

Except for a few hiccups, they think they are ready to rock the world.

Hiccup number one is the Tea Party movement. These people claim to be patriots who simply think that government is wasteful. Therefore, all taxes are bad taxes. This movement would like to control the Republican Party. If they gain control of the GOP, millions of moderates will likely leave. Most Americans are not extremists.

For some of the Tea Partiers, the cure-all seems to be to do without government entirely. These Libertarians' political beliefs verge on anarchism. "Let everyone fend for himself," they say, "and we can save ourselves the costs of government." A growing number of people are signing on to this ideology, without the critical thought that predicts the results of the solution. Picture, for one minute, 300 million Americans doing exactly as they please, with no laws. Convinced yet?

Others are simply conservatives, who have heard that big government is all that is wrong with this country. They forget that laws arise from need. They forget (or having gone to under-funded, Reagan-era schools, never learned) about the robber barons of the nineteenth century. They forget that men like John D. Rockefeller used money to undercut competition and corner markets by unfair business practices. They seem unaware of the consequences of giving big business a free pass. Never having seen a sweatshop from the inside, they doubt that they exist. If they do believe in sweatshops, they don't mind, as long as they employ children in Pakistan or China. They blame the loss of these jobs on labor unions, whose goals include stopping the creation of new sweatshops. They do not realize that eventually workers in sweatshops always unionize.

The Tea Party movement has a list of policy demands it would like candidates to agree to in order to gain its support. Republican candidates are not signing up at record rates. A candidate who agrees to the list can't listen to constituents or decide what is in their best interest or vote for what they say they want. A candidate who agreed to such a list would risk his or her political career for a single disagreement over policy. America is unwilling to march in lockstep.

The U.S. economy does not work the way Tea Partiers seem to think it does. The United States is not a true free-market economy. It is a mixed system, with aspects of free market capitalism and a state-controlled economy. This system evolved over the last 234 years to meet the needs of the country.

Rockefeller and his contemporaries convinced the nation to put limits on the power of wealth. Someone has to prevent corporate greed from destroying the environment. Someone has to prevent corporate greed from cornering markets and abolishing competition. The United States has a long history of promoting business through regulation.

When those regulations are abolished, markets get out of control. The financial crisis that gave birth to the Tea Party movement was born of lack of regulation.

President Obama mentioned in his state of the union address last week that everyone hated the bailouts last year. Obama did not originate the measures, and he was highly critical of corporations that continued to pay big bonuses.

The economy would be in far worse shape without the bailouts. Ben Bernanke was a Bush appointee. He made his recommendations based on extensive knowledge of economics. Obama respected that knowledge enough to keep him on and follow his plan.

If Republicans want to return to power, they will not do so by promising to destroy the society Americans have built. Most in the GOP seem to know this. Americans want to be protected from corporate greed. Americans want to protect the environment. Americans want to be safe from enemy attack. Most Americans realize that taxes are a necessary evil. Those who do not are deluded.