Tea Party Invades Occupy D.C. to Defend Capitalism | Video | TheBlaze.com

What happens when the Tea Party invades the seemingly never-ending “Occupy” protest movement? Until now, this question has been left to the whims of the imagination. But over the weekend, Accuracy in Media, Let Freedom Ring and Young America’s Foundation joined forces to infiltrate ”Occupy D.C.”

As you can imagine, the results are quite hilarious, as the Tea Party counter-protesters state their love for capitalism, holding signs that read, “Taxed Enough Already” and “Unions Destroy Jobs,” among others. The patriotic young men, who are predictably met with anger, hand out Constitutions to the “Occupiers,” while defending capitalism (Meredith Jessup covered this on the blog as well).

In the video, you’ll hear an Occupy D.C. protester call one of the Tea Partiers an “idiot.“ Another man calls one of the supporters of capitalism a ”candy a**.” And yet another individual who is visibly agitated says, “I‘m gonna turn away because I don’t turn the other cheek. You push me and you’re gonna have a problem.”

Some of the other responses, though, are even more bizarre: “Our troops are the terrorists” and “You and your corporate cronies…get the f**k out of my country” are two odd statements to look out for.

Accuracy in Media described the mission as follows: “To see what happens when three peaceful fans of capitalism, guns and our military take to the streets.”

Watch the insanity unfold, below (caution: language):

Tea Party Invades Occupy D.C. to Defend Capitalism | Video | TheBlaze.com

George Reisman's Blog on Economics, Politics, Society, and Culture: WHERE PROFIT COMES FROM

This theory of profit/interest has major implications for the understanding of capital accumulation, the determination of real wages and the general standard of living, taxation, inflation/deflation, and the business cycle. It also provides the basis for the overthrow of virtually all aspects of Keynesianism and its system of national income accounting, along with an equally fundamental and thorough refutation of Marxism and the exploitation theory.

George Reisman's Blog on Economics, Politics, Society, and Culture: WHERE PROFIT COMES FROM

Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus? - FoxNews.com

Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus? - FoxNews.com:

"Ayn Rand is everywhere and her political opponents are growing nervous.

Rand of course is a champion of individual rights, including property rights, and an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Walk through any Tea Party gathering and you’ll see signs such as “Who is John Galt?,” “Rand was right” and “Read Atlas Shrugged.” Paul Ryan says of her, accurately in my view, that “Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.”"

Seeing Like a State - Mike Reid - Mises Daily

When I first read James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, I was studying at a far-left Canadian university, and in one of its furthest-left graduate programs. I, like many of my instructors and peers, assumed that the proper goal of scholarly research was to help the state help its subjects — with everything from raising crops to raising children. I looked forward to a career as a wise academic providing the state with all the knowledge it needs to improve its subjects' condition. But my statist assumptions came to an end when I read, as Scott's subtitle puts it, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

Through entertaining case studies of disastrous state projects, Scott argues that government planners in the 19th and 20th centuries developed a particular aesthetic obsession: they were frustrated by the untidy complexity of real human societies. And their attempts to "improve" human life usually boiled down to attempts to simplify it — to make it look nice from the point of view of the administrator.

http://mises.org/daily/5101/Seeing-Like-a-State

Laissez-Faire Capitalism Not Cause of Melt-Down

The reason for the melt down was, essentially, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, quasi-government entities, were told by Congress to enable people who could not afford houses to make it possible for them to buy houses with little or no money down, and with zero due-diligence as to sources of income to pay the mortgages.

Lenders then were guaranteed that Freddie and Fannie would buy such mortgage notes, thus relieving the originators of those loans of any liability.

Congress put the full faith and credit behind these securitized notes now repackaged by Freddie and Fannie who in turn sold them to other investors.  I understand that many of these securities then became the linchpin for other financial instruments called derivatives.

In effect, a hundred thousand dollar mortgage might back millions of dollars in further credit, secured only by an overpriced, speculative property whose owners may have had but a couple of thousand in initial equity, if that much--about what it would cost to make a security deposit and last month's rent on an equivalent rental home.

What made this boom possible was Uncle Sam's willingness to secure these loans, when there was nothing to secure them in reality beyond speculative dreams.

This situation could not possibly happen in a capitalist system, because government would have no part to play in guaranteeing a bank's poor judgment about what constitutes a secure loan.  Historically, banks have required 20% down payment and perform a stringent "due diligence" and they would have done that in this situation had the government not required them to make easy loans in the first place and in the second to buy the bad loans as soon as they were created.

From beginning to end, this financial debacle was completely and totally the result of government policy and actions.  It was the direct result of Congress passing laws requiring that banks make bad loans.  The Bush Administration and Congress are both responsible for the ensuing catastrophe.  But keep in mind, Congress was run by Democrats and the people in charge of oversight, people such as Barney Frank, stated over and over again that these bad loans were perfectly fine and dandy and that the Bush Administration's warnings could be safely rejected. 

Bush didn't do enough, and Congress is primarily responsible, but however you come out on that score, the bottom line is that the government created this catastrophe, not private businessmen, and was caused not by under-regulation but by government policies explicitly designed to increase home ownership by people who could not afford to own homes.

Capitalism Magazine - Senator Rand Paul’s Morality and the Welfare State

A recent article about Senator Rand Paul in abcnews.com unintentionally reveals a lot about why the GOP has failed to make the proper case against the welfare state and in favor of constitutionally limited government.

In the article, we see some admirable stances from Sen. Paul, such as wanting to cut $500 Billion in spending (as opposed to the mere $50 Billion that the GOP has proposed), wanting to shut down the Department of Energy, the Department of Education and ending all foreign aid. But the same man advocating all these also goes on to say:

"As a Christian, we are our brothers' keepers and we do have a moral obligation to take care of them."[1]

Sen. Paul is championing economic freedom while at the same time championing the morality that prevents it from existing. If one holds the philosophy that "we are our brothers' keeper," which means our life must be devoted to serving others, than the natural political expression of this would be the welfare state. The welfare state ties us all to each other, forcing each man to be each other’s "keeper." That maxim represents the morality that gave birth to the welfare state.

Capitalism Magazine - Senator Rand Paul’s Morality and the Welfare State

Freer Is Better - Reason Magazine

The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom lowers the ranking of the United States to eighth out of 179 nations—behind Canada! A year ago, it ranked sixth, ahead of Canada.
Don't say it's Barack Obama's fault. Half the data used in the index is from George W. Bush's final six months in office. This is a bipartisan problem.

Freer Is Better - Reason Magazine

New Library Topic: Keynesianism | Intellectual Takeout (ITO)

"The Keynesian idea in itself is actually fairly simple: The market economy is inherently unstable, and recession and high unemployment are mainly the result of insufficient spending in the private sector. Therefore, to achieve full employment and sustained economic growth, the government needs to actively intervene to increase spending, if necessary through deficit financing.

Critics of Keynes pointed out problems with his theory relatively quickly."

New Library Topic: Keynesianism | Intellectual Takeout (ITO)

Common Fallacies About Capitalism 1

On my Facebook Page I come across misconceptions about capitalism, about corporations, and about business.  From time to time I will quote snippets from such misconceptions and then apply some reason and facts to enable you to make a more accurate judgment and revise your own notions accordingly.  Here are just a few I've recently come across.

I had written:  "As to fear, Americans have considerable justification to fear zero [the Obama Administration] and his thugs in Congress for the simple reason that Congress has been voting away our individual rights in favor of a dictatorship.  This is seen most notably with the recent passage of legislation that socialized the medical industry and deprives everyone of their right to run their lives as they wish."

To which my correspondent claimed:  "The insurance companies have regulations like any industry has."

Insurance companies are heavily regulated by the states.  Their rates are regulated directly and indirectly.  The state controls the market by limiting entry and it controls the product by specifying in detail what the product is.  To take Florida as an example, if you are an insurance company you are not permitted to sell medical insurance in Florida unless the state permits it, and the state will not permit it.  The state further tells the few insurance companies who are permitted to do business exactly what must be covered in the policies they are permitted to sell.  For example, I am not permitted to buy a policy that does not cover maternity benefits or mental health benefits, even though I do not want to pay for those benefits and can have no need for them.

The purpose of such regulation is to force me to subsidize through my excessive premiums the maternity benefits and mental health care benefits the legislature has decided it does not want to pay for directly from taxes.  Essentially the state is "shifting the cost" and indirectly subsidizing favored classes of people at the expense of others. 

So your facts are wrong.  Ordinary companies selling product or services are not required to get a permit to do so from the state, the state does not limit market entry, and the state does not tell the company what it can and cannot sell.  Companies must simply abide by the common laws all citizens must follow, pay any taxes due, which is the state's main concern, and the state will generally leave the company alone.  Customers then benefit by purchasing the product or service, or the company goes bankrupt because people choose not to do business with it.  People are not forced by the state to do business with it, as they are with insurance companies.


Claim:  "Without regulations, Lake Erie would still be dead and the Cayahoga river [sic] in Cleveland would still be burning."

This statement depends on what you mean by "regulations".  The principle of individual rights requires laws, and when a geographical area is without law, it is, quite literally, "lawless."  That was the situation with Lake Erie.  The "regulations" you cite--the Clean Water Act of 1972--essentially prohibited the dumping of nutrient phosphorus.  However, the problem would have been more effectively addressed by laws written to protect private property interests.  When you have a "commons" it is a well-known and understood phenomenon that unless the people who use the resource are permitted to develop informal or even formal rules for its use and disposal you will put into motion incentives that ultimately destroy the resource.

It is clear, for example, that current regulations do nothing to prevent dumping of raw sewage into these waterways and Lake Erie itself from public, not private, sources.  52 communities within the Lake Erie Watershed Basin, ranging from small towns like Avon Lake, to the larger metropolitan cities including Toledo and Cleveland, have 598 combined sewer overflow outfalls, or pipes, that feed into the waterways that lead into Lake Erie, or directly into the Lake itself.  An analysis of 38 of the 52 communities that dump untreated sewage shows that these communities dumped more than 10 billion gallons of sewage into the Lake Erie watershed in 2005 alone.  This is equivalent to more than 3 billion toilets flushing into Lake Erie--a drinking water source for more than 11 million people.  Combined sewage overflows are a major cause of beach advisories, wildlife destruction, and human death problems.

If private property rights were clearly defined in the Lake Erie Watershed Basin, Americans would have recourse to the courts to sue local and state governments to compel behavior from them that respected private property rights in Lake Erie.  But we do not have those protections because people have been mislead to believe that government "regulations" are protecting them.  Government typically does not monitor itself, doesn't sue itself, and, in fact, generally does everything it can to mislead and hide its malfeasance, just as ordinary criminals do.  This is another reason why the state should be separated from the economy as much as possible, i.e. a society based on laissez-faire capitalism, rather than the mixed economy of socialistic and fascistic controls with some freedoms also allowed.


Claim:  "BP didn't follow what scant regulations on drilling and we see the results."

Oil drilling activities are among the most heavily regulated in the country.  The facts are that the United States prohibited safe drilling on land and shallow water by fiat, forcing companies into the far more riskier deep water.  The government even gave oil companies incentives to drill in deep water and the current administration even exempted BP from having to meet its own regulatory standards.  In addition, the US specificially praised BP's platform, the one that blew up.

The outrage does not stop there.  Because of US regulations, BP was insured for only $75 million beyond the cost of any cleanup.  If BP had to get its insurance on the private market, instead of having the government insure its operations, that limit would have been far higher, the premium would have passed on through the chain in the form of higher production cost and the market would have substantially determined whether or not it was economically feasible to take such a risk.

The US government socialized the risk to BP for political reasons.  Such events happen when you have a mixed economy.  The solution is not more "regulations" but getting the government out of the the private sector so that it can provide the one thing it is qualified to provide the market:  clear liability laws that protect the people whose lives and property are being put in jeopardy.  We can't abolish risk, but we can insure against accidents.  When the government encourages risky behavior, rewards corporations for engaging in risky behavior, and then socializes the risk for risky behavior to further encourage it, how can the government be absolved of any responsibility?


Claim:  "The insurance companies are just leaches off the medical needs. It is not in any way single payer nor are these companies restricted. Hell, they wrote this health bill which sucks because it doesn't include an individual's right to bypass the insurance monsters who love to drop sick people and refuse to insure those with pre existing conditions."

You are misinformed.  As Adam Smith used to say, the tailor does not make you a new suit of clothes because he wants to see you well turned out; he turns you out in the best suit of clothes because he wants to feed his family and otherwise provide for his own economic needs.

Insurance companies are owned by stockholders, just ordinary people, looking to make some money by providing a service, a service that most people appreciate.

When government interfers with the private market, it initiates the use of physical force to compel people to behave in ways that oppose their own rational self-interests, and thereby corrupts the relationships between buyers and sellers, making them hostile.

People trade values voluntarily for mutual advantage, by definition, for otherwise they would not trade.  When government forces sellers to sell what they don't want to sell, and forces buyers to buy what they do not want to buy, government creates hostility, bad feeling, injustice, and sets up incentives for buyers and sellers to game the system in order to get what they want.

The fault lies not with the buyers and sellers, but with the government for intervening in the private economic activities of citizens.


Claim:  "Pray tell what individual rights have been removed since Bush/Obama?"

Perhaps you will accept just one example, since there is not enough time or space to list them all here.  The recently passed legislation that socializes the medical industry will have the effect of abridging the right of the people to seek medical care and to provide medical care as they wish.  Doctors will be forced to provide services and patients will be forced to accept services neither of them wants in precisely the way that they want them.  The government in this legislation establishes bureaus that will decide on what services doctors may provide and what services patients may receive, independently of the wishes of the doctor or patient.

The abridgment of individual rights, of course, occurs in some measure to some degree any time the government intervenes into the free market.  The medical industry was very heavily regulated prior to the rise of the Regime, a situation that created the manifold number of difficulties and injustices the new law pretends to resolve.  However, government intervention always creates many new problems that then require more government intervention, ad infinitum, until government comes to manage every aspect of life and no freedom remains for the individual.

Most everything the critics said of the new law, and denied by its supporters, is coming true as the regulations are put into place or proposed.


Claim:  "That bad memory lives on in the financial disaster we all are living thru [sic]. We and our government let billionaires play games with OUR money and homes. Capitalism sucks."

Your facts are wrong.  The system we currently have is very different from a capitalistic system.  Under capitalism, people have rights and the government does not have the legal power to abridge people's rights.

For example, in a free society (i.e. a capitalistic society) government would not have the power to force a citizen to pay the debt incurred by other citizens, as the current Regime has done in regard to the so-called "bailout".


Claim:  "AND your definition of socialism is not accurate. You describe communism."

Socialism commonly means government ownership and control of the means of production, i.e. all property.  Fascism commonly means government control of the means of production, but technical "ownership" remains in the hands of private citizens.  Communism commonly means government ownership and control of the means of production.

Socialism and communism mean the same thing.  The term "communism" has come to be associated historically with Marxism-Leninism, and the sorts of totalitarian governments that arouse under those politicians who identified as such.  However, there is really little to justify saying one is, in any particular, different in kind from the other.  For example, liberals greatly admire Fidel Castro and the murderous thug Che Guevara, and both these infamous sociopaths considered themselves socialists.  Liberals never tire, for example, in extolling the manifold virtues of the Cuban health care system, or the wonders of its education system.

Who Speaks for the Right?

As to the financial meltdown:

The essential problem with the sub-prime loans was that the market value of the underlying asset could not be sustained forever on the willingness of buyers to pay ever higher prices, on the assumption that prices would continue to rise.

Why did investors and lenders operate on the assumption that market prices for housing would continue to rise?

So long as Freddie and Fannie would buy the loans without verifying the ability of mortgagors to pay them off with current income or other assets, there was no incentive to perform due diligence, to verify income, no need to require a down-payment.

Where were the normal checks of free-market capitalism? Does anyone actually believe lenders would behave the way they've behaved during the real-estate boom, if they did not have two government agencies willing to buy whatever was offered? Asked in another way, how many lenders do you suppose would write no-money down deals without verifying income if they were to keep such loans in their own portfolios?

Who is the politician who can make this clear and defend capitalism?


As to the Republicans:

The Republicans lost for a lot of very good and understandable reasons. First and foremost, Republicans have given Americans some very bad government recently. Yes, there were some Republicans, including President Bush, who posted warnings. But what did Republicans do?

The principal disaster of the Bush Administration was the overwhelming and unaccountable failure to exercise leadership, to give an articulate voice for those Americans who believe the United States government is a government of limited powers delegated to it by the states and by the people, and that government is best that tries to perform its specific constitutional duties of providing for the common defense, rather than "reform" society according to the latest and best theories put forth by the liberal social engineers that constitute the Democratic Party.

The other disaster of the Bush Administration was its spending public money recklessly, extravagantly, and with utter disregard and contempt for the idea of limited government. Not once did the Bush Administration even threaten to veto Congressional approved spending bills, at least while Republicans ran the House and Senate.

One has to ask, as I did while the Bush Administration's basic trajectory was becoming clear, where is the political constituency for the big government Bush advocated? Social conservatives, economic libertarians and national defense hawks form the basis of the current Republican Party and Bush sought to appeal only to Social Conservatives and hawks. If any proof were needed of the importance of economic philosophy to a party's electoral success, we have it here.

Over the years of the Bush Administration I have spoken with many ordinary Republicans who became appalled by Bush's spend-without-consequence philosophy. It is rather difficult now, to oppose the spending plans of Mr. Obama, whatever they may be, because Republicans, under Mr. Bush, have completely and totally surrendered the tax issue, a marker for smaller, more limited government, to Obama and the Democrats, who promised a tax break to 95% of all Americans.

The American people may be mistaken to trust Obama and the Democrats with the responsibility of creating smaller and more effective government, but electing Obama was the only way to rid the country of the despised Republicans whose nominee only national defense hawks could respect, who went out of his way to insult social conservatives, and demonstrated complete contempt for economics by declaring he didn't know anything about the subject.

Even then he managed to get 46% of the vote. What would have happened had a candidate of the Right been the nominee, a candidate who was pro-life, pro-national defense, and pro-laissez-faire?

He (or she) would have won.

Tom Anderson

December 2008

Mr. Obama's Socialism

It sounds strange to hear Mr. Obama promote lowering taxes, for example, when he also advocates "spreading the wealth" as a form of "neighborliness." Mr. Obama and his followers go to some length to avoid identifying themselves as advocating the political and economic philosophy of socialism, but he let his rhetorical guard down when he told Joe the Plumber on national news that "spreading the wealth" around is precisely what his policies will seek to do.

Today's political discourse makes determining what might be called the political philosophy of the current crop of Presidential candidates difficult to understand, for as candidate Obama has said, "words mean things."

In a Presidential contest where the Republican candidate demonstrated some knowledge and understanding of capitalism, Mr. Obama's verbal slip would have been seized and used to great political advantage.

Unfortunately, today's Republican Party shows all the marks of an institution that has lost its way, and proof is found in the candidacy of John McCain.

What have we come to when supporters of limited government, lower taxes, reduced government expenditure and protection of individual rights might actually believe that Mr. Obama would be the better choice?

Mr. Obama campaigns on a pledge to reduce the taxes on 95% of all Americans; only those making more than $250 thousand annually will be subject to having an increased percentage of their earnings confiscated by the government in the form of increased taxes, to be redistributed by Mr. Obama to those citizens he believes merit the fruits of other people's labor.

Since all Americans do not pay income taxes, Mr. Obama's proposal will, in fact, provide "welfare checks" (i.e., "tax credits") to a lot of Americans, further blurring the moral distinction between money we earn and money that is given to us by having government first take it from others. We will be asked to view Mr. Obama's robbing Peter to pay Paul as a form of economic "fairness." A simpler notion of what socialism means could hardly be described.

Do Americans really want a government that has the power and inclination to rob some citizens for the unearned benefit of others? McCain has certainly made the point, all too briefly, during the last Presidential Debate, that Obama's tax policies will engender a renewed sense of "class warfare," but how many Americans really understand what McCain is talking about?

Obama makes the point that the McCain candidacy is merely an extension of Bush Administration policies. McCain retorts that he has opposed Bush any number of times on important legislation and, most particularly, in arguing for changing the military strategy in Iraq.

But is there a philosophical thread that runs through the McCain proposals, as there is in Obama's proposals?

McCain's responsibility as a Presidential candidate is to provide a consistent alternative to Obama's socialism. But McCain is failing to connect with the American people. His is a campaign of tactics, not strategy, for the good reason that he really has no grand strategy and no general stand on what government should or should not do.

It simply is not a fully worked out answer to this question, to oppose the raising of certain taxes. Nor does his tendency to pander, or to miss the many rhetorical opportunities Obama has given him, afford us insight into his wise thinking on this central moral issue of the campaign.

The question posed is whether people who earn their own living are better able to use and dispose of the fruits of their labor, intelligence, and talent than are a group of politicians pandering to favored constituencies, yet protesting their devotion to the general welfare?

There is a prudential argument implied in the question, and practicality bears upon the moral problem: Does man have an unconditional and exclusive right to the fruits of his own life? Does man's life belong to the state, to the deity, to some earthly leader, or does it belong to the man himself?

Here is the critical distinction between socialism and capitalism. Under capitalism, the people who make the money make the decisions on how to spend it; under socialism, that choice is, to a greater or lesser degree, taken from the people and given to politicians acting as agents for the government.

Mr. Obama should be applauded for making more clear than does the typical politician that he believes one of the primary functions of government is the pillaging of the few for the unearned benefit of the many. An effective opponent does not oppose such class warfare by arguing that the few should be able to pillage the many--what Mr. Obama and socialists generally believe happens when people's rights and property are respected.

An effective opponent of socialism argues instead that no citizen should be pillaged, and that if rich people, such as Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, wish to give their resources away to others, that is their right to do so, but it is not right for government to confiscate private wealth, for the simple moral reason that wealth, as opposed to plunder, must first be created. Who has a greater claim, those who create the wealth or a gang of politicians who have succeeded in getting themselves elected to office?

Clearly Mr. Obama believes that political gangs have greater moral claim to the creator's wealth than does the creator.

Whence comes this idea?

The idea that government has a greater moral claim to a people's wealth than the people do derives from the belief that people's lives belong to the government. If the government owns your life, morally and legally it has the right and even obligation to use and dispose of your life any way it sees fit. This is the central idea of socialism, fascism, communism, and every other form of government men have devised to steal the people's wealth, make war, and enrich themselves at the expense of others.

It is certainly legitimate to make the argument that organizing society on the basis of such altruism cannot work. It has been tried over and over again and failed as often as it has been tried.

But why aren't the great moral arguments against socialism brought out by the Republicans? Could it be that Republicans have come to accept the same flawed morality?

As religious conservatives and traditionalists have gained influence, the Party finds itself intellectually incapable of opposing a political philosophy--socialism--whose moral premises they share. Whether you believe man's life belongs to a deity or to a government, either choice denies the fundamental truth that man owns his own life and a proper, decent government does not presume to overrule a man's choices, unless he violates or threatens to violate another's rights.

Do you have an unconditional right to your own life?

That is the fundamental question in this election campaign that Mr. McCain fails to see clearly. Mr. Obama suffers from no such handicap and each day advances his answer.

Tom Anderson

October 2008

Gay Republicans?

Or, Why Gays Should Hold Their Noses and Vote Republican Anyway

Far be it from me to suggest that gay men and women differ so little in their political views that it makes sense to talk about a specifically “gay” political ideology.

Yet gays do seem to have some common political objectives, mostly having to do with the right to be left alone.

Unfortunately, the desire of gays to live their lives without being discriminated against in employment and to be able to form close personal and sexual relationships in the same manner and with the same legal protections as heterosexuals, outrages the Christian fundamentalists in our midst, causing them to express their hostility to gays politically by supporting Republican politicians who mouth anti-gay slogans at election time, but who, at other times and places, employ gays, have gay friends, and may even engage in homosexual activity themselves, as “closet homosexuals.”

As seen in the recent Foley scandal, some gays seek to “out” closeted gays, arguing that honesty is better than hypocrisy.

I argue that gays do have a common politics, and it is a very old political viewpoint–-the French have a wonderful phrase for it: laissez-faire capitalism.

What the phrase basically means is that the purpose of law should be to secure the rights of the individual against those exercising through law disproportionate economic and political power. It means, simply, “Leave us alone!”

What gives those exercising greater power the right to do so? What gives government the right to deny to gay couples, what is offered to heterosexual couples upon payment of a small legal fee?

Any group in society secures its power to abridge the rights of others by getting laws enacted that are generally justified at the time of their enactment by appeals to “the public interest” or to some similar political abstraction that can be twisted and turned to serve whatever political goals the group has in mind.

At present the varied political interests that make up the American electorate are broadly arrayed into “conservatives” and “liberals”. We also have two major political parties: the dominant party, the Republicans, consist of a very broad coalition of interests, and the Democrats, the party “in the wilderness”, seems far less broad, apparently consisting of Neanderthal Leftists, such as those whose views are best represented by The Nation magazine, and other self-styled “progressive” groups each of which seems to have a favored hobby-horse to ride.

What until fairly recently distinguished the two parties was the willingness of the Republicans to champion “limited government.” Ronald Reagan welcomed the Christian Right into his crusade to “get the government off the backs of the American people”, but he never let the Christians rule the roost. While his administration was not particularly helpful to gays with the explosion of HIV-related deaths in the 1980’s, indifference and incomprehension are not the same as hatred and the desire to do injury.

Even today, as the Foley scandal highlights Republican attitudes towards gays, what emerges is more an attitude of opportunism–the desire to play the “gay card” in order to motivate homophobic Christians to vote for Republican candidates–than any outright hatred or desire to inflict injury upon gays.

As much as homophobic Christians might wish to harm gays, the most significant anti-gay legislation since the election of Bill Clinton to the Presidency in 1992 has been the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by Clinton. The other significant bit of law to harm gay people was the Clinton military policy of “Don’t Ask–-Don’t Tell”. Justified in the name of making it possible for gays to serve honorably in the military, the policy has become a shameful blot upon the military by a civilian government that seeks to keep its anti-gay credentials well burnished for election-day politics, despite the positive harm the policy does to our military–-depriving it of skilled and expensively trained personnel by cashiering gay soldiers and officers–-and to gay self-esteem, by treating gays as second-class citizens, unworthy and unneeded in the defense of the country against foreign enemies.

Any hope that the long-suffering American people might be done with “Big Brother” type government was dashed in the 1988 election of the first Bush Presidency. Reagan rose politically with the first conservative revolution, the taking over of the Republican Party in 1964 with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. “Goldwater Republicans” considered themselves “movement conservatives” and typically believed in a very libertarian-oriented society where government, particularly the federal government, would have its many functions substantially reduced or eliminated.

Why democratic government tends to expand in its functions despite the best efforts of people like Goldwater or Reagan to restrain it, is a conversation for another time. But there is a lesson for gays to heed.

Gays need to look to the history of a party and not just its current crop of politicians to see where specific gay interests are more likely to find political defense.

Are not gays interested in a prosperous economy where their hard work and intelligence are rewarded? Do not gays enjoy keeping most of their earnings for their own use and disposal rather than have increasingly larger portions of their earned income siphoned off to support tax breaks, subsidies, and special legislation for Big Business, otherwise known as Crony Capitalism?

Do not gays have an interest in protecting our borders against illegal immigrants? Are we not interested in preventing further attacks on our cities from Islamo-Fascists? Do we not enjoy tax cuts? Are not our economic interests enhanced by laws that reduce government intervention into the economy?

I don’t like to quote statistics, but isn’t it true that gays have more disposable income than non-gays?

Gays don’t seem to fit the profile generally used to describe the left-wing “nut-cases” that control the Democratic Party at present, for the simple reason that gays want respect and freedom to be left alone. They don’t want what the Democratic Party normally promises: more subsidies, more taxes, more regulation, more intrusion of the Nanny State into every aspect of their lives.

The Republican Party today is up for grabs. George Bush is not a movement conservative. I believe gays should not leave the Party but reclaim it by holding it up to its professed libertarian origins. What will become clear, if the proper arguments are made, is that homophobic Christians in the Party express beliefs difficult to square with limited-government rhetoric. And while there may be more homophobes than gays in the GOP, clearly gays can have a significant impact intellectually by making the arguments that Republicans really can’t ignore.

To some extent, I must confess, either party has some libertarian origins gays could draw upon; but which image is more likely to be gay? A ward of the state, or a businessman? A ward of the state, or a creative artist? A ward of the state, or a leatherman seeking to find his bliss in consensual erotic adventures?

The Republican Party, whether the current crop of politicians understands this or not, is the “natural” home for gays and lesbians. Our nemesis is not the Party, but the homophobes within it who would replace politicians with priests.

Tom Anderson

October 2006