Political Lipskip

This is What the Tea Party Stands For

A great explanation of what the Tea Parties hope to accomplish with their protest movement. From Richard Samuelson. Condensed from the Patriot Post Brief.

“Are this year’s ‘tea parties’ really tea parties? What could today’s protesters have in common with the ‘Indians’ who dumped 90,000 pounds of tea in Boston harbor in 1773? Quite a bit, actually. What do today’s tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement ‘is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective.’ Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that the government seems to be a closed circle, run by an elite in both parties. These elites, combined with a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, use government power to serve their own ends, and not the public good. … When the government is unresponsive to the views of the people, and, beyond that, when our administrative and judicial branches restrict the scope of the people’s legislative rights, protest rises. President Obama, an heir to the Progressive tradition, wants to strengthen this unaccountable, administrative state. The response has been altogether fitting.”