The freest country in the world is Somalia. It is so free that there is no government.
Not many Tea Party rallies talk about the economic miracle of the free market like Somalia.
Every single nation ahead of the United States in GDP per capita and the Human Development Index has a larger welfare state and a big government.
The government shutdown has lasted a full week, and with the Democrats and the Republicans firm in their positions, one may wonder about the root of this hostility.
The Tea Party Republicans and their market fundamentalism are the source of the dysfunction in Washington.
To be against the Republicans and the Tea Party doesn’t mean you are 100 percent for Obama and the Democrats. It just means that in this scenario, they are the cause of instability and present a threat to our way of life.
The Tea Party as we know it started just a month after Obama took office in 2009. It started out rationally with rallies against the government bailouts, but when they started protesting government spending and the new health care reform as socialist, it was all downhill from there.
In the aftermath of 2008’s financial crisis, the Tea Party blamed the government. They ignored the financial derivatives the government never regulated, the banks becoming too big to fail and the systemic, risk-driven incentives of Wall Street bankers putting profit above sound business.
This radical, fringe-of-market fundamentalism champions limited government as the American way to run the country, and this is the ideology that caused the problem in the first place.
These ideas affect us today with hikes in tuition, cuts to government programs and now a government shutdown.
These are examples of real world consequences when fundamentalist beliefs become public policy.
But what is limited government? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and defense make up 65 percent of federal spending; do the Tea Party Republicans want those programs to not exist? Do they use computers, the Internet, pharmaceutical drugs, mail, food, water, roads, bridges, ports, dams, state universities, electricity, radio, television or airports? Because all of them come from the state sector or depend on state subsidies.
Tea Party rallies often claim Obama is a socialist and the Democrats have a progressive agenda, which is a socialist agenda, which in turn is a communist agenda, which in turn is a Nazi agenda, which in turn makes Obama equivalent to Hitler.
The United States didn’t become a socialist dictatorship under Obama. It is a mixed economy as presidents and Congress have debated and passed social programs and regulations for 100 years in order to benefit everyone.
Obamacare is just the latest social program passed by Congress and signed into law by a two-term president which was designed to fix an existing problem the market clearly couldn’t handle.
The Tea Party worldview is distorted. It perceives the early 20th century as a capitalist paradise before big government intervened with social programs. Tea Party members believe social programs turn the American people into moochers.
This worldview is outdated and more utopian than the old school 1960s leftists. At least they wanted to create a new world of equality and social justice instead of twisting the past, making it seem like child labor, thousands of workers dying on the job per month, African-Americans being treated as second class citizens and having millions of poor people living in abject poverty were a necessary side effect of freedom.
The Tea Party’s goal of reversing more than 100 years of progressive legislation isn’t in our interest. With the debt ceiling closing in, the American people must not let the market fundamentalists threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.