The Genesis of the TEA Party Insurgency

Interesting theory here, with a lot of weight. It favors the Tim Carney Theory--that Big Biz is NOT in opposition to Big Government, but an ally, albeit sometimes semi-willing.

...The American government has become a gigantic regulatory juggernaut. It decides the fate of individuals, businesses, whole industries, and entire regions. A few lines in a statute, or a paragraph in one of the many administrative codes that enmesh our productive lives, can mean wealth or ruin. This is a huge, unchecked, and increasingly unaccountable power. Where there is such power, as our Founders knew, it will be abused. Picking better people won’t solve the problem, because where such power exists, it will corrupt the people who have access to it. This is a political law almost as universal as those of Newton and Maxwell in the realm of physical phenomena. A regulatory state this powerful will necessarily be corrupting, venal, and suffocating.

The guy doesn't even bother to mention Wisconsin--or any other of the several States.

The most powerful force drives the leviathan-state: rational self-interest. The self-interest of the politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists and their employers (mostly businesses), drives this vampire-leviathan to grow more and more powerful, to consume more and more of the assets and energy of the American people, to became the only path to wealth and status and independence. Americans who once would have sought to invent and create and innovate, to seek wealth and status and self-fulfillment in private enterprise, are driven instead to become courtiers and lackeys and wire-pullers.

Drivers include Santelli (the immediate cause), and include:

There are appear to be three factors that have caused the rise of the Insurgency now, and the particular form it is taking: 1) technology, 2) a new, heightened awareness of the problem, and 3) the shock of the current crisis.

The reason that the Statism was successful is simple, and has been voiced countless times.

...each individual person in society—all of whose members bear the burden of this system—only personally suffers a small cost from each new inefficiency, new regulation, each new complication in the tax code.

Diffused costs, focused benefits. Simple.

Page Two tomorrow.

HT: McCain & Co.