The Wonder Springs Chronicle

TEA Party Flavors

22 April 2009

Volume 11, Issue 16

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Last week’s TEA Parties on Tax Day were ignored, castigated, embraced, or celebrated. Some reputable sources have total attendances at between half a million to a million people. Some not so reputable have this at much less to well over a million. It was said that President Obama was unaware of them taking place, or perhaps there was just an unwillingness to look seriously at a world who does not favorably endorse the Administration’s belittling of America’s past, while failing to understand his hope for a benevolent community of government centered personal peace and affluence for everyone - everywhere.

This week we will look briefly at three overriding points that came out of the TEA Parties. These three seem to fit with the concept of group leadership of KISS, or Keep It Simple Stupid. We have seen a couple of these TEA Party analyses however, that seem to have a dozen similar points, which may be modeled on twelve step programs such as Tax Payers Anonymous.

The general tone of the Spokane TEA Party, which I attended, seemed to have a fundamental belief in the “Supremacy of America’s Founding Documents and Principles.” By this I mean, absolute standards by which the country is to run, past, present, and future. These documents and principles are not evolving into something more equitable and harmonious, by current whims of the intellectually enlightened, or a political class.

As we continually report here, those foundational writings center around Natural Law and the Common grace expressed by Nature’s God, the Creator of the Universe, a God consistent with the Biblical Trinity.

This comes into direct conflict with the post American Revolution concept of evolutionary enlightenment based solely on a different kind of naturalism, in which there is no god at all and everything has essentially a totally naturalistic explanation and source.

Evolution doesn’t really answer the big human epistemological questions of Origins, Purpose, and Destiny. Hence in a world, which came from nowhere and is headed nowhere, what we are to do now that we are here, is pretty hard to define in anything but relative terms. In fact it illogically asks, “Am I here at all?” Therefore logic itself really has no basis for its existence either.

In such a world, those who presume to be smarter, logically assume that they are more capable of telling everyone else what to do, but that still begs the deeper question, what is the basis of that enlightenment and from where does it find its moral justification?

Thus we quickly understand the difference between science and religion. When I was growing up, science was what my father used to convince me to eat my vegetables, religion was what I used to say that I didn’t need them. But as I grew, I came to believe that I could use science to not eat my vegetables, and my father fell back upon his religion when confronted with my no vegetable scientific arguments. Luckily it never came to brute force, for I was raised in a very logical home where both the absolutes of my father’s power and authority were never really brought into question.

Sadly we live in a world today in which many children grow up without a loving father figure, and hence science and religion have not only become one, but also these (emotional) children have no basis by which to confront, or maintain a real worldview in which life can be best defined as a pilgrimage.

The Supremacy of America’s Founding Documents and Principles have a unique position among the continuing civilization of humanity, because they recognize, adopt, and codify, the nature of human religion as coming from beyond human intellect and hence possessing an absolute nature not subject to continually changing natural environmental and human factors. At the same time America’s Founder’s fully understood that human reason does help us to adapt to this rapidly changing world.

The TEA Party conflict hence is really a conflict with traditional American values contrasted with a religion that says we can make it up (successfully) on the fly. If the Founders were correct, eventually those Natural Law and Nature’s God standards will prevail, even though the change may become quite uncomfortable just as it did during the American Revolution.

The Second of our three points of the TEA Party showed that the participants were seeking, “Real Money for the Creation of Sustainable Wealth.” Again if you look at history, wealth creation was the reason for the creation of money to begin with, as a means to store wealth rather than stockpile barter goods. Money for the sake of money, especially debt money, is really a new and rapidly evolving human creation, with no basis in the real world outside moneyed special interests

Many T. E. A. party participants carried signs that used the acrostic: Taxed Enough Already. Party critics stemmed from the belief that the TEA Party on TAX Day was about too many taxes now. However these signs pretty much looked to the future in which they believed that all sorts of taxes were going to have to be instituted to pay for massive government spending, spending unseen throughout the entire course of human history.

This points to a dichotomy in current American policy that really is not a political discussion in left or right terms, but one based upon the conflict between the rights of the individual and his or her obligation to the community as a whole. On the one side these rights must flow from the government to the individual, on the other side these rights must flow from the individual to the government. The American experiment was founded on rights flowing from the individual to the government. The Obama Administration seems fixated upon changing that direction, and hence flows their concept of “Change you can believe in.”

If carried to the extreme, on one side you have a fascist government, on the other you have social anarchy. Currently there is no civility in the United States to tension these two extremes toward civil discourse and then begin an even more complex task of making that tension function in a real world with limits. Many of those limits forcing solutions, which cannot be achieved without some sense of sacrifice of at least a few people groups.

Hence what is really called for currently, is not so much about taxes more or less, but true leadership. TEA Party participants were generally not favorably disposed to the financial leadership of either George W. Bush or Barack Obama, for they see no quantifiable difference between the two.

This lack of leadership however quickly brings us to the third TEA Party principle that must be integrated into both the actual tax debate as well as the absolutes beyond a human social engineered lifestyle. That principle is the “Freedom from Special Interests.”

What we have seen in less than one hundred days of the Obama Administration is a sharp distancing of itself from the Bush Administration, except in one area, and that is Big Money – Wall Street Financial Special Interests. The TEA Parties formed really because of the fact that these special interests were and are driving, not just the present economic climate of the country, but also the economic future of our children and grandchildren.

Too big to fail is a new concept founded upon the supremacy of not just government, but redundant special interests having vested special rights beyond those of the individual. These special interests - special rights have evolved out of the collusion of all “independent” branches of government, the executive, the judicial and the legislature.

The main reason that the President chose to not notice the TEA Parties is that they collided with his lack of fiscal responsibility to those who consider his Chicago community organizational skills, not a valid management paradigm for anything other than radical urban community organizing.

However this aloof “management skill” was similarly promoted and administered by the Bush Administration. Every time I fill up my car with gas, the smell of the dictated ten percent addition of special interest ethanol to my motor fuel irks me to no end, especially when I calculate the mileage which is ten percent less than what it was before this absolutely special interest money making scheme manipulated my gasoline supply.

Then I see the price, which isn’t truly market controlled, but contrived by global oil companies, cartels, and options traders, now functioning to maintain prices at the expense of true economic fundamentals. But such are baby steps toward energy independence, which are about to be put on steroids with cap an trade and carbon tax hikes that will make individual income taxes look minute in comparison.

According to Marketwatch.com on April 15, 2009 the TEA Party – Tax Day, the US Tax Code was 70,000 pages long. A ream of normal office paper is about two inches tall, hence if it were all printed out it would reach eleven feet eight inches high (3.6 meters). If you went down to the local copy store and worked out a deal to copy the whole thing at five cents a page it would cost you $3500 to print it out.

So what is included in this massive document? About 70,000 pages of special interest legislation, some of it focused upon the individual, but most of it to give tax loop holes to those with money to lobby the federal government for special favors. Which brings us to the biggest hurtle for the TEA Parties to succeed, and that is America’s current spin on two party politics. The chief goal of the political parties is to get incumbents reelected to congress. This is true on a limited scale at the state level also, but when you divide the pot by fifty, the stench is slightly less galling.

Out of the TEA Parties, a number of people have asked if a third party would be formed to represent traditional American values? As long as the political spectrum is not a spectrum at all, there seems to be no viable alternative. The only hope is that again our elected representatives realize they are supposed to profess to be real human beings, seek to develop a conscience, and then develop the gumption to stand for something other than themselves. Then will real change, not just spare change, with a focus on absolute values begin to take root. The problem is that special interest will still be in control of our universe.

President Obama says he wants to simplify the tax code. That same dream came from Ronald Reagan, in which he wanted to base the Reagan Revolution on a flat income tax. Even the remarkable Old Rancher Ron, lost out to special interests. Since most of the funding for President Obama’s big government proposals focus upon revamping an energy infrastructure that is not now capitalistically viable, chance of his energy proposals being anything but more special interest legislation is zippo.

However, if a flat tax were enacted, people would have more money to spend, or at least more free and less control over their money and wealth, and then perhaps they might not be so insecure in their hope for the future, and maybe decide to invest in solar panels without a tax credit, or buy a small diesel powered car, instead of a tax credit hybrid, the list goes well beyond energy and automobiles, to everything we do. Who knows, we may create an economy based upon wealth creating enterprise rather than one base completely upon debt driven consumer consumption.

If you stop and try to put the TEA Parties in some type of unified workable construct, the one thing that has merit is free enterprise – taxed as free enterprise, or a flat tax based solely on how much money you make. This is as close to Natural Law applied to human activity as it gets. This has never been tried in the United States. Even before the enactment of the Federal Income Tax, government has always tried to make their interest, your interest. With a Flat Tax, if you want to buy a house to make it your home, you can do that, if you would rather rent, so be it. If that flat tax truth had been in place we in the United States and the rest of the world would not be in this current economic depression. From what I understand Russia instituted a flat tax model, based upon American economics, why not try it here?

These three TEA Party proposals are something to contemplate as we continue to attempt to find a way out of this human and special interest caused economic swamp where the level is about to rise significantly by the stupendous flood of non energetic debt money. The option seems to be not so much what you are paying now, but how much are you going to be paying in the future and will it really make any difference barring some real stupendous change in the special rights of special interests.