Constitutionally Speaking...

Political discourse has always suffered from what I would have to call the Red Sox Syndrome.

If you picture two baseball fans debating the merits of their teams, you can't imagine one of them calmly leaning over and saying--in as soothing a voice as possible--"Chuck, I know you're a Red Sox fan, and I respect that, but here's why I would like you to consider getting wildly excited about the Yankees."

People have tribal, gut-fed, almost hereditary attachments to the labels they wore growing up. There are life-long Catholics who can't vote pro-life if it means they'll have to check a box against a Democrat. There are 4th generation Republicans who won't defend the Constitution if a Republican happens to be desecrating it. The spirit of party is not the spirit of thinking people, and until we begin thinking beyond party, to what is right, what is true, what is fair, politics will remain a baseball game, with about the same level of rational discourse--pretty slogans, handsome candidates, empty minds, and obscene hecklers. I'm happy to report that the Tea Party movement seems to reflect every political and professional stripe: Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Academics, Civil Servants, and Entrepreneurs.

The common reality among Tea Party types is intellect. If you don't understand Adam Smith and the long, sorry historical record of failed command economies, the Tea Party movement will never excite you. At the Pasadena Tea Party, there was a band of Russian emigres who had personally tasted the fruits of Bolshevism. You see that contingent at a lot of tea parties--refugees from state economies who spent their childhood waiting in line for potatoes. They can't quite believe that America would entertain economic ideas that literally left them hungry as children, in places like Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Block. If you don't understand that politicians promising loans to people who can't repay them, in return for votes, is what caused both the real estate bubble and the current recession, you will never get excited about the Tea Party movement. If you don't understand that there is nothing "free market" about bailing out global mega-corporations, just because they operate, nominally, in the private sector--you will never understand the tea party movement. If you don't understand the moral tradition behind protecting private property, and its real world economic benefits, you won't understand the tea party movement. You have to be a little smarter than Keith Olbermann, in other words, to comprehend basic economics.

Of course, no one wants to be called a socialist today. Politicians still get elected by promising tax cuts--even if they don't mean it. They still pretend they want to promote private sector jobs, but when you head into a recession, the very last thing you want to do is raise taxes or make spending promises that will plunge all of us into greater debt. That's something like putting a cast iron saddle on a race horse and expecting him to run faster.

If you don't understand that, you will never understand the tea party movement.

Tea Parties Now and Then

Now: My untrained eye estimated approximately 300 people at the intersection of Yucaipa and Bryant yesterday, with heavy crowds on all four corners, and colossal good cheer on the part of the protestors to hear so many motorists blaring their horns in loud support of the notion that we are over-taxed as a people. One mother, commenting on the economic slavery to come, hand-crafted a huge sign that read "My Child is Not Your A.T.M."



The idea behind modern political street theater (the Rileys weren't the only ones wearing three cornered hats and sporting the Gadsen Rattlesnake flag) is that a memory will be stirred up in the hearts of the public. That memory, of an ancestry that fought and bled to protect "unalienable rights," may find its way into the voting booth and we can peacefully turn out the current generation of pensioned blood-suckers occupying public office. There are plenty of them in both parties, and their essential characteristic is this: they see the tax-base not as a means to build bridges and protect the homeland, but as a means to hand out jobs, contracts, and goodies to their cronies and constituents. In an era of declining personal morality, there isn't a voter anywhere who isn't susceptible to the message "it's all those _______ (fill in your favorite enemy's) fault." The public trough, to these politicians, is the vast ocean of revenue made possible by people who work for a living. As one old man put it to me yesterday, in the form of a riddle:

"What's the difference between a congressman and a thief?"

"I'm having trouble deciding," I said.

"You can arrest a thief."

The simple truth is that there can be no political liberty without political leadership willing to protect private property. Once you begin taxing one class of people to pay for another, the hard-working either leave, or stop working, and you run out of goodies to spread around. As Margaret Thatcher put it, "the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money."

I'm hoping the current generation of protestors understands that this is not a partisan issue. It's not a matter of Bush or Obama, Clinton or Palin. Both parties have proven they think they know how to spend your money better than you do. I'm also hoping the pastors of America realize that tax-gluttony on the part of our leaders is a deeply spiritual issue, that they begin to remind their flocks they are not very good Christians or Jews if they elect "statesmen" who are willing to steal from them in the name of good stewardship. I can at least hope the pastors of Americas discover their manhood, even if I saw precious few of them out there yesterday.

Then: even though the Boston tea party of December 1773 had a measure of street theater about it, there were, of course, vast differences to contemplate. In the first place, representation was a critical issue in the 18th century controversy. The idea of having absolutely no say in the taxes a foreign legislature places upon you was, and is, a critical threat to individual liberty. Even with representation, the prospect of 51% of the people deciding they can expropriate the wealth of 1% of the population has to be called what it is: democratic theft. If you live in a democracy of cannibals, it is no comfort to know that you were at least democratically voted into the stew pot. The next generation bearing the mantle of sons of liberty need to do more to protect the liberties of economic minorities. Income taxes and death taxes need to be eliminated entirely, in favor of consumption taxes, or tariffs. The raising of tax levels should have a 3/4 barrier in our legislatures and not a paltry 2/3. Pastors, again, this is a spiritual issue. If you vote for a thief, you are a thief.

The Boston Tea Party was also a secret affair. To this day, we're not sure who participated and who didn't. The participants didn't blog about it, and most didn't even mention it on their death beds. It was also, very clearly, a crime against property--specifically intended to protest an even greater crime against property. The participants were willing to risk mass prosecution because they had faith in each others' silence, which really amounted to a kind of blood oath. A year earlier, when 400 Rhode Island men burnt a revenue schooner to the water line, the British authorities couldn't find anyone to testify against them. Call it what you like--but that is solidarity of a sort we can't even imagine today. Today, if you even mention the Constitution as a standard we should re-invigorate, the Department of Homeland Security puts you on a list.

Finally, the original sons of liberty had spiritual ballast. The pastors of the day were willing to talk about a Christ who cared about justice in this human sphere. Certainly there were Tory apologist pastors and firebrand Whigs, but neither party spent as much of their time filtering the message through their own "church-growth" parameters. Christ was King everywhere--not just in the sanctuary.

Let him who has ears to hear, hear.

The Weary Warrior Returns

Never play airsoft with your employees--especially if they are suited up in full camo and sniper ghilli gear. I don't think the camo is really very effective at hiding you, as a shooter, when you are holding a dayglo orange barrel-tip that can be seen from here to Lake Elsinore, but wearing all that gear is a good guard against feeling a "hit." I only played one round of "defend the mine" and I took a hit in the head and one in the trigger finger and one in the donkey cart. The head hit was the most jarring.



"Get down, Dad, Brandon's got a sniper rifle."

"He can't hit me from there. Ouch. Yes, I guess he can. I'm dead. Hear me? Dead! Hold your--ouch--fire."

Earlier in the week, we visited a premium internet airsoft warehouse--Evike.com in Rosemead--and these people were loading up the UPS truck with what looked like four or five cubic yards of gear, to be shipped all over the country. They may talk of nationalizing the banks and bailing out General Motors, but it looks to me as though the airsoft industry is doing very well. (Don't tell anyone; someone will figure out how to tax what works in order to pay for what doesn't.)

Over the course of this nation-wide financial crisis, I have developed a mild addiction to CNBC, and I was one of the first to see Rick Santelli call for a "tea party" on the floor of the Chicago exchange. I was gratified to see that Americans, overwhelmingly, still have the sense to call President Obama's mortgage relief plan what it is: grossly unjust. It rewards people who took unreasonable risks by taking money from people who saved enough to put something down on their homes. As the plan is commonly understood, the only people eligible for relief will be those who helped cause the problem in the first place by over-leveraging themselves. In the same sense, it also rewards the very bankers who made these kinds of loans, and the wall street people who re-packaged and sold them to investors who didn't do their research. In one sense, it is exactly what you would expect from a president who wouldn't even release his transcripts at Columbia and Harvard: a plan to help failures, authored by someone afraid of being accused of failure.

A few folks rightly observe that we bailed out Wall Street CEOs; why not a few of America's under-class, trying to stay in their homes? The answer is that two wrongs don't make a right. We simply don't have the resources to protect every square inch of the status quo. At some point, we have to realize what Davey Crocket realized nearly two centuries ago: you cannot use the public purse to benefit private individuals, just because you have the votes to do so.

This ethical moral lapse--this corruption in the White House itself--is not quite as disturbing as the sense I am getting that an entire generation of Americans could care less about what is right and what is wrong. Cliff Mason, a young, Harvard educated moral dim-wit, who helps Jim Cramer write copy for CNBC, wrote this week that it doesn't matter what is "fair" and what is "unfair." The only thing that matters is shoring up the banks. We've been hearing that a lot lately. Stop worrying about "ideology." Stop worrying about taking the moral high ground. Just do anything to keep the system rolling, no matter what the moral hazard. This is an emergency people: throw out the truth if you can't handle it.

As one of the traders on the exchange put it, "why don't we all just stop paying our mortgages?"

Think about it, Cliffy. It's not the banks that keep America rolling, or Washington, or Wall Street. It's people doing the right thing. The only thing that keeps a bigger man from dashing Cliffy's brains on the sidewalk and emptying his wallet is his sense of what is fair, what is just, what is true--that divine spark called "conscience."

Here's to hoping America rediscovers what Cliff didn't find at Harvard.