by Dick Armey
Tea Party activists understand that the opposite of the invisible hand of the market is the invisible foot of the government. Every dollar spent by the government is taken from the private sector. Nineteenth-century French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat called this the “seen and the unseen2,” as the government points to everything it does with tax dollars, but what is not discussed is what would have been created by the private sector with that same money.
The economist Milton Friedman warned us that the true rate of taxation is government spending. With trillion-dollar deficits projected for years to come, we fear the greatest threat to our freedom and way of life will come from our out-of-control deficit spending. Inevitably the government will be free to either deflate our currency or impose catastrophically high taxes.
Today’s spending is tomorrow’s taxes. Whenever the Tea Party is protesting spending it is looking at the long term and protesting future taxation. Higher taxes degrade our standard of living, leaving citizens with fewer choices and fewer dreams.
4. OUR BLOATED BUREAUCRACY IS TOO BIG TO SUCCEED
THE FOURTH DOMINANT THEME common to Tea Party activists is an understanding that the government has grown too large and invasive. The government can’t control its own border or run the post office, let alone manage a bank or auto company.
The relationship between the private sector and the government is similar to that of a horse and a jockey. The winning combination is a strong and fast horse with a nimble and light jockey. When the jockey grows too large and the horse is starved, eventually the horse will collapse under the weight of the jockey.
The bloated public sector robs the private sector of much-needed capital investment. Capital is like fertilizer: when it’s spread on the private sector it grows the economy; when it’s fed to the government it grows more government.
Advocates of bureaucratic centralization have also invented a new nomenclature to support their policies, such as earned versus unearned income. Only the government can force you to hand over nearly 15 percent of your salary in Social Security, and then complain that Americans do not save enough.
And government begets more government. Whereas individuals in the real world have to live with the consequences of their decisions (unless they get a bailout), government does not because it can always get more money from the taxpayer. The only check on its growth is the ire of the citizenry. Government is also staffed by people who do not worry; they have the ultimate in job security. When a government program fails, the advocates of big government inevitably claim it failed because it was underfunded, not because it was a bad program.
Big government is driven by two audacities: (1) the presumption that people are dumb and don’t know what’s good for them, (2) people are corrupt and dishonest; therefore it is incumbent upon the government to take money and spend it on citizens’ behalf. On the other hand, the Tea Party has trust in the practical genius of the American people to be responsible for making decisions.
Possibly the best illustration of the separate philosophies came in an exchange between former Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and a woman representing the education establishment. She wanted more government money and control of education and Gramm wanted more parental control. According to Washington folklore, the exchange went something like this:
GRAMM: There is no one in Washington who knows and loves my children as much as I do.
LADY WHO REPRESENTS THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT: I take exception to that Senator Gramm. I believe I do.
GRAMM: Oh yeah? What are their names3?
Every society has to find a balance between liberty and security. Europe has chosen to put more weight in security and subjects the individual to the needs of the collective. The Founders intended to create something different—a system that favors liberty. We value liberty highly and this commitment to the individual is what makes America unique. As Ben Franklin once said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
We now find this commitment to personal and economic liberty being challenged by the government’s size. President Obama and Congress are looking to “Europeanize” the United States through a legislative stampede of government control: the nationalizing of our health care system, cap and trade energy taxes, and aggressive unionization. Tea Party activists know you cannot have European-size government without European-size taxes and a corresponding loss of liberty.
The financial collapse of Greece should be the canary in the coal mine. Greece is the first Western country in recent memory to experience a sovereign debt crisis. In 2009 the Greek budget deficit was 13 percent of GDP and investors did not believe the Greeks could credibly get the budget under control. The Congressional Budget Office reported that the United States’ 2009 budget deficit was 10 percent of GDP4.
Clearly the United States is on an unsustainable path. In less than five years the interest on the debt alone5 will approach $500 billion. How long will it take before the market loses its faith in our ability to pay?
THE SOLUTION IS IN OUR HANDS
SOON AFTER THE ADOPTION of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government they had formed. He replied “a republic if you can hold it6.” Franklin understood the threats of special interests and enemies of liberty from around the world and within the fledgling nation.
While activists like Mary Rakovich and the others profiled throughout the book tend to share the common views described in this chapter, there is still great diversity among those who claim the Tea Party mantle. Make no mistake: disagreements exist and not all activists are in lockstep on every issue. But these individuals share a bond of bravery. In the face of criticism and doubt they walked out of their living rooms and into the street to fight for something they believe in.
The best way to start something, these novice protesters discovered, is to start it. Just get out there and do it. It was messy at first and each made their fair share of mistakes, but they learned on the job and formed powerful coalitions of private citizens that are beholden to no corporation, no union, no patronizing politician. Self-sufficient and self-sustaining, these networks live off the land and can strike at a moment’s notice. They are the future of American grassroots activism.
FOLLOWING HER GALVANIZING PROTEST in Fort Myers, Mary Rakovich could have returned to anonymity content in knowing that she had done her part. After all, few protesters could claim the kind of success she had achieved on their first foray into activism: coverage on national television, the ire of her opponents, congratulatory calls from friends and fellow citizens. Instead, she went right back to work.
Barely two weeks after storming the Harborside Center, Mary traveled to Phoenix. “Imagine my surprise when I found out the next stop on the president’s bailout and stimulus road show was Arizona,” she said. “I just had to do it again.”
By the time President Obama arrived in Phoenix, the nascent Tea Party movement was beginning to gain steam. “In two weeks I went from being virtually alone to standing with a crowd of more than five hundred people. This is when I realized momentum was building.”
After returning to Florida, Mary began working to prepare for the national round of tea parties scheduled for February 27, 2009. “I took my small but growing e-mail list, and with the help of a few new friends, we had a Tea Party on Fort Myers beach. More than forty people showed up, and this time the paper and local TV were there to cover it.”
On April 1, a Tea Party event was held in Cape Coral and the number of attendees swelled to three hundred. “We didn’t have a stage, but we brought a stump and a megaphone,” Mary recalled. “You could only keep speaking as long as you kept getting thumbs-up from the crowd.”
At the April 15 tax day protest in Fort Myers, more than two thousand citizen activists gathered to make their voices heard. “Now the press was really taking us seriously,” Mary said.
As the health care debate heated up in Washington dur
ing the summer, Mary and her local group redoubled their efforts. “We had ten separate events outside of our local congressmen and senators’ offices. We called, we wrote letters, and we marched. We were making our voices heard and getting more and more people involved in the political process. It was empowering.”
After a summer of activism, Mary and her husband, Ron, decided to join their fellow citizens from across the country and participate in a march planned for September 12 in Washington. She had come too far to turn back now.
Chapter 5
The Status Quo Lashes Out at the Tea Party
SOMETHING WAS GOING ON outside the Beltway, out in America. People were indeed starting to speak out against those in charge, those who were mismanaging the public purse and abusing the public trust. And the establishment—the politicians, opinion leaders, the vested interests—started to notice. And before long, they felt threatened.
By April 2009 one leading indicator of the Tea Party’s growing effectiveness was its expanding chorus of critics. They lashed out at the citizens who did not fit comfortably into the categories that normally defined politics as usual. The growing power and positive impact of this citizen revolt could now be measured in inverse proportion to the outrageousness of the claims about it and the attacks leveled against it.
It started with two left-wing bloggers—suffering from a deep state of denial—in a particularly vitriolic post at Playboy.com. Their claim, as implausible as it seemed, was that the entire protest movement against an out-of-control government was completely phony, a contrived conspiracy. They called it “Astroturfing.” These were not real people with real concerns, they claimed, but a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign designed by partisan mercenaries to stop Barack Obama from achieving his destiny.
As veteran Russia reporters1, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was. . . . All of these roads ultimately lead back to a more notorious right-wing advocacy group, FreedomWorks, a powerful PR organization headed by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey.
This paranoid fantasy about what they termed the “FreedomWorks mega beast” should never have seen the light of day. Indeed, Playboy quickly removed the post from its site. But not before the “Astroturfing” narrative was picked up by the liberal economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. On April 11, 2009, he referred to FreedomWorks as the “Armey of Darkness2” behind the Tea Party movement on his blog. Krugman repeated the story, virtually unchanged, in the New York Times on April 12. “It turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment,” he wrote. “They’re Astroturf [fake grass roots] events3, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.”
Now everyone was repeating it. After all, it was in the New York Times. Three days later, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi parroted the fiction: “This [Tea Party] initiative is funded by the high end4—we call it Astroturf; it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s Astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.”
During the 2008 debate over President Bush’s first tranche of what would be many bad taxpayer investments, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, designed to prop up bad mortgages, Matt Kibbe was arguing with a reporter over activist participation with a FreedomWorks Web site called AngryRenter.com. Tens of thousands of very real people had signed our Angry Renter petition against the bailout, many leaving comments that reflected an economic wisdom woefully lacking in Washington. It was fake grass roots, the reporter claimed. “Well,” Matt responded, “what do you consider real grass roots?”
“I’m conducting this interview,” the reporter answered. “I don’t have to define my terms.”
In truth, the definition of grass roots sometimes depends on what side of the debate you are on. It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.
New critics started speaking up, sporadically at first, as willful ignorance of this rising tide of citizen discontent gave way to the realities. The social status of each voice seemed to increase as well, from the lunatic fringe to respectable scions of the Democratic establishment, as the status quo felt more challenged, more threatened, more at risk of losing power. The critics came from the left and the right of the political spectrum. They came from fringy bloggers and left-wing talk show hosts. Then they came from the mainstream media, think tanks, and elected officials.
Eventually, the biggest of big dogs started to bark: House speakers, former presidents, even The Man himself. The Obama administration itself would ultimately play the Astroturf card to explain the wave of opposition to the President’s health care plan that arose at the congressional town hall meetings in August 2009. At an August 17 press gaggle aboard Air Force One, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked to identify which special interests were opposing their hostile takeover of the health care system. “Dick Armey’s group is out there5,” he responded, “actively getting people to go to town halls and yell at members of Congress.”
PRESCRIPTION FOR GOVERNMENT CONTROL
THE PRESIDENT WAS DEMANDING that legislators rush a health care bill through Congress before the August recess. Another hurried, opaque, secretive legislative fire drill—replete with backroom deals cut behind closed doors with powerful pharmaceutical and health insurance interests. It’s not difficult to understand why folks might get frustrated, even angry, that another trillion-dollar proposal, particularly on a topic as personal as your family’s health care, was to be hurried to the president’s desk and signed into law without a full, transparent, and honest debate.
It sure seemed like official Washington was willfully ignoring the wishes of its constituents, didn’t it?
It seemed that way, because it was that way. In an undisciplined moment of inconvenient candor after the election, the new White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” There was a short window for the new Obama administration, “an opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before6.”
So the American people flooded town halls in August, prepared to ask tough questions about the Democrats’ health care proposal. They showed up in droves because Washington was trying “to do things that you could not do before,” just like it did with the stimulus bill in February and with the Wall Street bailout the prior fall.
As the Tea Party grew, the Democrats and their allies let their deepest insecurities get the best of them. The public was starting to understand! Accusations of Astroturf quickly gave way to uglier smears against the grassroots citizens who opposed big-government policies.
On August 10, 2009, Nancy Pelosi and House majority leader Steny Hoyer published an opinion editorial in USA Today entitled “ ‘Un-American’ Attacks Can’t Derail Health Care Debate.” “It is now evident,” they argued, “that an ugly campaign7 is under way not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue.”
Before the August recess, Pelosi had let another of her own insecurities slip out, responding to reporters asking her about the failure to complete a bill by the end of July. “I’m not afraid of August8,” she said. “It’s a month.” Was she goading citizens into action—to rise up and prove her wrong?
Well, that’s exactly what they did.
Once upon a time, the American Left celebrated grassroots participation in town hall meetings and a full-throated legis
lative debate as one of the very best American traditions—the vanguard of participatory democracy. This was the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings. This was Freedom of Speech, circa 2009. They ought to have lauded these brave citizens for their willingness to get informed and challenge the political wisdom of the ruling class. That’s part of what it means to be an American, right?
We’ve been involved in public policy debates long enough to know that when someone is losing an argument based on the facts, they try to change the subject. Thus liberals’ hysterical reaction to the rising public opposition to their hostile government reboot of the American health care system. Thus Democrats’ hostile attacks on the citizens who overwhelmed congressional town hall meetings over the August recess. It was “un-American.”
STEEPED IN BITTERNESS
WILLFUL DENIAL EVENTUALLY GAVE way to ridicule and mockery, starting with juvenile locker room humor. On an April 14 report, CNN’s Anderson Cooper opted for dirty jokes9 rather than his heavily branded expertise in investigative journalism, joking on-air that “it’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging” to a stunned audience. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow actually managed to say the words teabag and teabagger10 an amazing sixty-three times during a seven-minute segment on the April 15 tax day protests. This tasteless double entendre soon became good fun for the Far Left, seemingly a useful substitute for substantive policy arguments. Eventually, it too worked its way from the unserious fringes to the Oval Office.
On November 30, President Obama himself would pick up the derogatory phrase, telling Jonathan Alter that Republican opposition to his politically disastrous stimulus bill “helped create the teabaggers11 and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”
Then the ridicule and mockery gave way to straight-up hate.
HITLER’S MUSTACHE