printJames Ostrowski is the founder of the latest tea-party revolt. He is an attorney, writer, political consultant and libertarian activist; a columnist for LewRockwell.com, and president and founder of Free New York. He’s also a good friend. James has issued a cri de coeur, which I echo wholeheartedly, with one, semantic, reservation: Obama is the enemy just as Bush was. Ideas or entities are not enemies; their executors are.
THE TEA PARTIES WILL FAIL IF THEY ARE A GOP FRONT OPERATION
By James Ostrowski
I helped organize the Buffalo tea party and am now planning more events and helping others do so as well.
My concern is that the some of the groups working on this may be GOP-front groups.
(Let me say for the benefit of those who don’t know me, I’m not a liberal Democrat. I’m a hardcore libertarian who happens, for reasons lost to the sands of time, to be a registered Republican. I am also a political consultant whose clients have included Republicans, Democrats and one capital L Libertarian.)
Anyway, why do I think this?
Their websites are too slick. Their people have high-level GOP ties. They focus their attack on Obama and the “Democrats.” Their own positive agenda is rather thin and focuses on Pavlovian rank and file buzz words like “pork.”
Now, I am a huge opponent of pork and have written, I don’t know, 15 articles about it. But when Republicans use the word, it’s often part of their 50-year old rap to con the rank and file by claiming they will cut “waste, fraud and abuse.”
That’s total BS as I have demonstrated ad nauseum many times including in my book.
The great Jefferson, the last President to make a meaningful cut in the federal government, taught us this: the only way to cut the size of government is to cut programs, departments, agencies.
No conservative Republican regime ever made government smaller. At least, no one has given me an example of one that did, after three years of asking. (Thatcher? It’s sad they had to go abroad but some very shrewd people on the Mises e-list disputed even her record in that regard.)
Before this post threatens the page limit of Atlas Shrugged, let me get to the point.
I will work with anyone who sincerely wants to roll big government back towards the old republic. But if this movement is simply a GOP front operation designed to return to power the same set of degenerate creeps who F’d up the country for the last eight years and set the stage for the God Obama’s final sacking of America, I will not work with them. I will expose them and fight them.
Look, I just yesterday took a swipe at the libertarian Campaign for Liberty. I have on many occasions battled my fellow libertarians if I think they have gone astray and, a fortiori, I will do the same with conservatives.
Obama is not the enemy. He’s just their latest errand boy. The enemy for all true patriots is the corporate state that came in around 1917–and killed the old republic–the Fed, the Income Tax, our strange obsession with dragging farm boys from Iowa over to Europe to die for corrupt European empires.
So the test for determining whether any group or person is a front operation is their agenda. Is their agenda restoring the republic by enacting radical structural change in the regime? Or is their agenda getting DeLay and Gingrich back into power?
And I thought I was the ONLY classical liberal left in America.
Because of the foibles in the big-L Libertarian Party (eccentric Badnarik and “conservative Republican” Barr plus people like Stan Jones turning themselves purple… ) and the obscene Warfare-Welfare record of the Republican party, I like to refer to myself as a Grover Cleveland Democrat. I believe that Jim Ostrowski of Buffalo is also an admirer of Grover like Ron Paul and the late H.L. Mencken. Politics is generally designed for big and little ambitious political Messiahs who want Government to solve all the world’s problems. How often do you hear a politician tell people to SOLVE THEIR OWN PROBLEMS (such as Day Care / taking care of children as I saw in Ilana’s post)? Even some Libertarians see government as the alpha and the omega and think that government caused every problem on earth – no no no – people have PERSONAL problems and it is their responsibility to solve them – find jobs, educate their kids, take care of their health – instead of slavishly listening to political demagogues and turning into helpless dependents. “The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and (Governments’) functions do not include the support of the people.” – Grover Cleveland, 1893.
I changed my voter registration to Republican last year so I could vote for Ron Paul. After the election I was reminded somewhere of what my mother used to tell me about always wearing clean underwear in case you were in a car accident. I immediately thought of that voter registration card in my wallet.
So I was going to change it back to independent but I saw a party in Florida called the Boston Tea Party. I couldn’t find any information about it with google but I liked the name so that’s what I now have on my voter card for party affiliation. It says BTP where it used to say REP.
So now you have me worried I’ve been suckered into joining a front group for the damn Republicans.
I believe the tea parties are a grassroots movement but we need to be careful that they don’t become a front for people who thought the last eight years of Republican rule were just fine.
Watch the agenda. If it’s all about attacking Democrats and all their proposals are fuzzy, stay clear and form your own group.
The predicament the nation is in is the result of the policies of both parties for many decades.
Major structural change is required.