Democracy and Power 114:  The Power Players

Who actually controls the force of government?   The politicians and interest groups control the American political process.  As stated, the politician seeks power.  Special interest groups – big business, small business, unions, education, seniors, and a multitude of others - seek favors: tax breaks, subsidies, exclusive legislation, etc.  Interest groups give enormous money to political campaigns, and receive gigantic benefits in return.

The Republican divide: K Street vs. Tea Partiers

Advocating for a smaller government, less taxes and more freedom, Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks wrote , “But let us be clear about one thing: The tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party, but a hostile takeover of it.”.

The battle for control of the Republican Party between the K Street lobbyists and the tea party activists has engaged.  Timothy P. Carney in the Washington Examiner explains.

K Street Republicans’ coffers are filled by the political action committees of defense contractors, drug companies, lobbying firms, and Wall Street banks. A Tea Party Republican is funded by the Club for Growth or the Senate Conservatives Fund, which is run by the Republican leadership’s least-favorite colleague, Jim DeMint.

Carney cites the Republican primary contest in Kentucky:

Before the May 18 Senate primary, secretary of state and McConnell acolyte Trey Grayson had raised a half million dollars from PACs —20 times the PAC haul of upstart Rand Paul. Paul got a check from outgoing curmudgeon Sen. Jim Bunning, but 18 Republican senators bankrolled Grayson’s campaign, plus the Republican Mainstreet Partnership and three top House Republicans.

Grayson pocketed political action committee cash from businesses that have sided more with Obama than with Republicans, such as $10,000 from drug maker Pfizer — a key champion of Obamacare. Other Grayson funders are a rogues’ gallery of subsidy sucklers and regulatory robber barons: bailout bandits like the American Bankers Association and the Managed Funds Association; Obamacare backers like the American Hospital Association and a dozen drug companies; ethanol baron Archer Daniels Midland; cap-and-trade profiteers like Duke Energy; and government contractors like the Chubb Corp. and Northrop Grumman.

A K Street lobbyist who had represented AIG during the bailouts hosted a fundraiser for Grayson, and at least a dozen lobbying firms and industry groups backed him with cash. And of course, Trent Lott was a Grayson donor.

Lott is the captain of the K Street team. He told a reporter last month his thoughts on the Tea Partiers: “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”

Yes, FreedomWorks and tea party activists are seeking a hostile take over of the Republican Party. 

 However, it is much more.  Much more. This is a fight for freedom.  Freedom thrives when there is a small and constrained government dedicated to protecting people and their property from the force and fraud of others.  Predominately, this was the vision and intent of the makers of the American Constitution.

Millions of Americans sense the Constitution has been debased and personal freedom is diminishing.  Individually and in small groups, Americans are actively voicing their concerns about debt, deficits, taxes and DC corruption, which reduces every American’s freedom.

 The 20^th Century was the struggle against totalitarianism, and democratic and free countries defeated many commanding and controling governmental systems.  The first significant struggle of the 21^st Century is personal freedom versus an American governance system corrupted by special interest groups and power lusting politicians. 

The immediate contest is between special interest lobbyists lead by former Majority Leader Lott and tea party activists for freedom.  Will freedom seeking Americans defeat the nexus of power and money of lobbyist Lott?

 The Democracy and Power lesson: 114:  The Power Players

Interest groups give enormous amounts of money to political campaigns and receive gigantic benefits in return.

 Join FreedomWorks and the hostile take over of the Republican Party.  This is an epic struggle to restore freedom.

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The tea party movement will revolutionize the GOP – and the nation’s political landscape in the process, says former House Majority Leader Dick Armey.

Armey, now the chairman of FreedomWorks, and FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe predicted in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview that America's 1 million-plus tea partyers will reform the GOP and remake it into a force serving the cause of liberty rather than breaking away and forming a third party.

As a result, the GOP will beat the Democrats instead of being “a Democratic Party echo chamber” that pushes the same policies, says Armey, who co-authored the book “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” with Kibbe. The book details the tea party movement’s past, present and future.

“There’s been a real wave of tea party victories in Republican primaries where you’ve seen tax-and-spend Republicans being replaced by real fiscally conservatives,” Kibbe told Newsmax.TV. “That suggests to me there is going to be not just a lot of Republican victories on Nov. 2, but a real shift in the center of gravity and the focus of this new majority.

“I happen to think the Republicans are going to at least pick up [a majority of seats in] the House, and maybe the Senate.”

The tea party movement confounds Democrats because it lacks someone like billionaire George Soros behind the scenes pulling the strings, and because voters from all walks of life participate in it, Kibbe and Armey say.

“The fact of the matter is this tea party movement ̶ these folks who put the idea of liberty, Constitution of the United States, free markets ahead of other forms of public meddling by powerful governments ̶ have a number of people who they have come to trust and respect,” Armey says. “Sarah Palin’s one of them; certainly [South Carolina Sen.] Jim DeMint is probably the officeholder of greatest respect; and I think they have a lot of respect for FreedomWorks.

“I like to think they like me a little bit, too. There is no doubt about how they feel about these folks because they’ve stayed consistently loyal to the central principles and ideals that are governing all of our motives in this big, broad-based, grass-roots movement in this war against big government in this country.”

The size of government has had a negative impact on the economy because it has put more than $2 trillion of private capital on the sidelines, and that will only be made worse by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of this year, Armey says.

“If you want to stimulate the economy, give the private sector the signal that government will not take away your profits and will not regulate your behavior, so feel free to invest,” Armey says. “That’s a better stimulus than you could ever get from the government.”

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

In our new book, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and I discuss the fundamental problems with assuming that public officials have our best interests at heart.

Excerpt from Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto:

The Tea Party movement adds a welcome addition to the fundamental debate over the size and scope of government: grassroots activists armed with the intellectual arguments they need to make a difference in political debates, not just scholarly discussions. What is happening is a dramatic increase in the physical infrastructure and on-the-ground personal politicking that can turn ideas into action. The new generation of limited government scholars, and the internet, provides an even wider audience for good ideas. But unlike earlier generations, the new generation as the muscle to make things happen in the political arena.

While standing for the right ideas and values is vitally important, it is naive to think that politicians will do the right thing simply because a proposed polict will benefit the general citizenry, creating the conditions for economic opportunity and individual prosperity for all. That’s simply not how things work.If there was doubt about the proposition before, today it is painfully obvious that politicians in power often act in their own self-interest at the expense of the “public interest”.

The “currency” that drives the political marketplace is fundamentally different from the private economy. In the private economy, it is enough to have a good idea, identify a new product, develop it, and sell it to an identified (or created) customer base. In the market, entrepreneurship and competition determine outcomes. Returns and values matter and are ultimately determined by individuals making choices.

In the political economy, good ideas, philosophical values, and economic efficiency have little to do with how public policy decisions are actually made. The biggest error made by advocates of government planning, from Marx to Keynes to Obama, is the assumption that bureaucrats and elected officials possess both the detailed knowledge and right motives to be able to solve the economic problems of a nation. While microeconomics correctly assumes that individuals act in their own self-interest, every macroeconomic proposal for government intervention assumes that public officials act in the public interest, somehow supressing their individual interests to the greater interests of society.

In reality, public choices are driven by the interests of those making the choices – the politicians who draft, promote, and vote on the legislation; and the special interests that work to influence the political decision-making process. Politics is driven by the need to solicit new voters to the polls. Power (to tax, spend and regulate) is used to consolidate those votes, and to buy more votes at the margin. The policy agendas of both parties are driven by this pursuit of votes and power.

It may not please New Yorker magazine’s James Surowiecki to hear this, but the tea party movement could be the clearest evidence yet of the growing relevance of his landmark book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” and its application in politics.

Surowiecki’s fundamental insight is this: The aggregate knowledge, experience, analytical prowess and inductive powers of a group are often greater than those of any one of its members. This observation isn’t always and everywhere true or evident, but compelling demonstrations of its operation in daily life are plentiful.

With everybody connected to everybody else via the Internet, new means of uncovering the wisdom of crowds become possible. The political implications therein remain rather murky, though.

I was reminded of Surowiecki earlier this week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and his tea party co-conspirator, Freedomworks.org President Matt Kibbe. The Journal piece coincided with publication of their new book, “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto,” published by HarperCollins.

Armey and Kibbe wrote that the tea party movement “has blossomed into a powerful social phenomenon because it is leaderless — not directed by any one mind, political party or parochial agenda,” resulting in the creation of “a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics.”

This “beautiful chaos” is analogous to the “spontaneous order” Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek said results from the proper operation of free markets, according to Armey and Kibbe.

The clincher here was their noting that the tea party movement reminds Americans that “decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge.”

But if Armey and Kibbe are right, if the tea party movement is indeed sparking new ideas, innovative tactics of social and political organization, greater personal freedom and enhanced opportunities for individual expression, why is its mere mention certain to inspire frothing, spittle-spewing fury in your typical liberal, aka “progressive”?

The answer is, as Armey and Kibbe tell us, “the big-government crowd is drawn to the compulsory nature of centralized authority. They can’t imagine an undirected social order. Someone needs to be in charge — someone who knows better. Big government is audacious and conceited.”

Put otherwise, the right believes in freedom from the bottom up, the left loves contemporary expressions of the Guardians, Plato’s race of philosopher kings.

Once you get your mind around that reality, it clears up many of the apparent anomalies about the current state of American politics. Here’s an example: Less than two years after winning the presidency, Barack Obama said, “After 18 months, I have never been more confident that our nation is headed in the right direction.”

That sentiment puts Obama at dire loggerheads with two-thirds of his fellow citizens, who think he’s taking the country off the deep end.

Obama is reaching so far to the left, toward political centralization, a top-down command-and-control economy, and a Washington-knows-best regulatory mentality, that he’s becoming a fringe voice alien to most Americans who believe government authority must be decentralized and individuals thereby empowered to act voluntarily from their local communities.

The tea party movement is the heart of the 70 percent of the citizenry who fear Obama has gotten the country seriously off the right track. They want fundamental change and they won’t settle for more Washington, D.C., double-talk, backroom dealing or broken promises.

Tea party activists are the vanguard of a revolutionary renewal of the American founding. And that’s why they inspire such irrational hatred and fear in so many of the precincts of the left.  

Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog at www.washingtonexaminer.com.