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El Comercio, Ecuador
The Tea Party and
Laissez-faire
By Juan Esteban Guarderas
Translated By Norma L. Colyer
5 November 2010
Edited by Julia Uyttewaal
Ecuador - El Comercio - Original Article (Spanish)
The new U.S. movement was not incited by the defeat of Obama; it has been promulgating its rage for months. Obama’s active and progressive stance, contrasted with the lukewarm moderation to which politicians had us accustomed, has awoken a new beast.
The tea party movement, which has been largely responsible for the blow just suffered by the Democrats, is a monster with many limbs. Not having an official affiliation and being managed by multiple groups, it does not have a clearly defined ideology.
Throughout the profuse demonstrations, countless colorful ideals have been expounded, which, although not related, are all weighed down by a strong, stale smell. So many racist as well as anti-immigrant causes have crept in, along with other ideas as disparate as skepticism regarding climate change and the ecological crisis.
But faced with the advance of the Obama government and its corresponding interventionism, the whole movement is consistent with the idea of classical liberalism and public sector downsizing.
Flaunting an astonishing lack of historical memory, a proto-nineteenth-century spirit has been recaptured. Basically, the libertarian revolution ideology itself was revived, calling for the abolition of taxes, the elimination of all fees and slashing public spending. In that sense, it is necessary to refresh one’s memory and remember what happened to the nineteenth-century liberal state. It played out that the private power turned out to be much more cruel and merciless than the public institutions. Without labor laws, a low wage competition that decimated the well-being of workers was put into effect. Workers volunteered to work for less and less, to the point of accepting salaries and conditions that did not meet their basic needs.
The existence of Marx was a historical product of that context; his was the voice that had to occur because the situation of the working classes inevitably had to be denounced.
But their Alzheimer’s forgot not only the long term but the short term as well.
The financial crisis of 2008 was caused by the private sector which, without controls, fanned risk until it contaminated the entire system.
And it was, as a matter of fact, highly interventionist actions like the mammoth rescue following the financial crisis that saved the world from a new 1929.
It would be possible to continue endlessly enumerating arguments, starting with the economic policies of Keynes.
There are reasons why the death of the old liberalism was celebrated by veritable rivers of ink, because if successful, the U.S. will be on a real roller coaster.
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