Daily Archives: 16 December 2011

Liberals and Tea Parties

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“Liberals need a tea party, damn it,” wrote Jonah Goldberg in a recent National Review, and thus “have embraced the [Occupy] movement…with the understanding that they’ll worry about the details later, if at all.”

So why don’t Liberals, generally, or the Democratic Party, specifically, have anything other than the Occupiers and the public service unions that are, more and more, running the Occupy “movement?”

Because, unlike modern Conservatives, generally, or tea partiers, specifically (who, it turns out, are main stream America), Liberals don’t have any tenets that are foundational to individual liberty, to individual responsibility.  All they have is a fundamental belief in big government and an equally fundamental distrust of their fellow citizens’ judgment.

Tea partiers, modern conservatives, are whole-hearted supporters of such basic principles of liberty as freedom of speech, freedom of religion (the positive freedom actually to practice their own, not the negative freedom of no one else’s being visible), equal opportunity for all individuals, and most of all, these two things: freedom from government interference with these, and the primacy of individual responsibility.  In short, tea partiers hold out for the continued implementation of the Declaration of Independence’s acknowledgment

that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Tea partiers, mainstream Americans, understand that they are far better suited to determine how their lives should be lived and how their resources should be allocated than any government can hope to be.

Liberals, on the other hand, are the quintessential big government believers.  It’s Liberals who insist on wealth redistribution programs—run entirely by government—as the only legitimate means of leveling wealth and income.  It’s Liberals who insist on these equal outcome goals of wealth redistribution, at the expense of equal opportunity for all Americans.  It’s Liberals who insist that government must be the means of first resort for those who need a hand up, and not the means of last resort.  It’s Liberals, also, who insist that government keep giving those hands up (which can come only at the expense of other Americans) to the point they stop being hands up and become permanent handouts.

All of this flows from that fundamental Liberal distrust of ordinary Americans, it comes from their foundational belief that some Americans are better suited to govern and to make decisions about individual lives than are common Americans.

What kind of grass roots movement might support that?

Anger in the EU

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But it’s misplaced, and perhaps driven by embarrassment.  Great Britain refused, a few days ago, to go along with a proposal to alter the fundamental European Union treaty to allow for the creation of a fiscal union, touted as a solution to the existing EU sovereign debt crisis.

The petulance of others of the EU leadership is illustrated with these examples:

Le Canard Enchaine (The Chained Duck) reports that French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Great Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, a “stubborn child.”  Apparently, Sarkozy went on: Cameron had only one goal, that of “protecting the (London) City, which wants to continue to behave like a tax oasis.”  As if either of these—protecting his capital city, and maintaining a tax oasis (if that’s what he was doing)—were a bad thing.

And this: Guy Verhofstadt, the head of ALDE (Alliance for Liberals and Democrats for Europe), a liberal group in the European Parliament, spoke on the matter in his native Flemish Wednesday: he didn’t think English would be an “appropriate language.”

Others have insisted that Great Britain now must quit the EU.

But Cameron isn’t so alone (at least not yet) as his detractors insist.  Ireland has said that it must submit the matter to a national referendum.  Recall that the continent had a negative attitude toward the Greek government’s attempt to refer bailout terms to their people for consent or rejection.  Similarly, the Czech Republic and Sweden now insist on involving their respective parliaments in any decision to go along with a fiscal union.  Indeed, the Czech Republic has gone further, insisting that any union should apply only to members of the euro zone, and Hungary has joined them in this assessment.  Both the Czechs and the Hungarians also are on record as rejecting coordinating—”harmonizing”—national tax policies, a key parameter of a fiscal union.  Such a thing, they say, can “bring nothing positive, nothing good.”  The Czech Republic has gone yet further: they will discuss the matter, but they will take no decision for or against the union until they know the details of the pact—including those heretofore undefined “sanctions.”

Given that the proposed fiscal union cannot succeed and does not actually address the present crisis (it can only face the inevitable next one), and given that part of the demand for the treaty change involved demands for tax changes that would have hit Great Britain disproportionately, Prime Minister David Cameron was right to make the moves he did.

And given that the proposed fiscal union cannot succeed and does not actually address the present crisis, and these are becoming increasingly clear as other members of the EU share British concerns about the efficacy of the pact, the detractors are beginning to see the blunder they’ve committed with this “union.”  They’re expressing their embarrassment as anger and frustration—a sign, not of their obstinacy, but of their continued failure fully to realize their error.  That realization is only just beginning.