I've been reading about the reaction to the recent government blunders with some amusement. The Tea People are sorely disappointed and they seem to represent the majority view of the nation in this if not all things. A minority of extremist Democrats and loosely aligned supporters have reacted violently while accusing the Tea People of violence. Odd that, since it has always been those Democrats and fellow travelers who have been the most violent ones, charmed by the revolutionary rhetoric of communists and other malcontents, bragging about bringing guns to knife fights and sending their opponents to the morgue if one of their own is sent to a hospital.

It's just talk for the most part, but what talk! I chuckle when some soft and pudgy academic claims to be a voice of reason and restraint when reason has nothing to do with their views or their rhetoric, and their restraint is only occasional, letting their masks slip with some regularity, perhaps to signal their deeper thoughts or inoculate themselves against the virulent pathogens that are so common in the academic environment.

I have little insight into what is really going on. This may be just the grousing of those whose beliefs are being trampled by a calloused minority that has seized power, or heartfelt anguish about the continued unraveling of a once vibrant society that had achieved a larger measure of self rule than any before.

it was exhilarating to hear CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli invoke these great doings of two centuries ago in his famous February 2009 outburst that gave birth to the Tea Party movement. Two days earlier, newly inaugurated president Barack Obama had signed his $787 billion stimulus act, which taxpayers ultimately must finance, and which went in part to keep bloated state and local governments from having to fire the unnecessary “swarms of officers” that “harass our people, and eat out their substance,” as the Declaration of Independence described King George’s tax-financed colonial officials. The next day, Obama had proposed a $75 billion mortgage-modification program to save sinking borrowers from foreclosure. Why doesn’t the president have a referendum “to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?” Santelli demanded. Turning to the commodity traders behind him at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he asked, “How many of you people want to pay your neighbor’s mortgage, that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” . . .

In what other country could a TV reporter, without missing a beat, invoke his nation’s founding ideas—and on top of that, give rise almost instantly to hundreds of Tea Party groups with tens of thousands of members grounding their opposition to President Obama’s redistributionist program on a similar appeal to the Founders? . . .

What unifies the many Tea Partiers . . . is their fear that the president’s various Great Recession bailouts, along with his government takeover of health care, will change America from the limited-government, individualistic, free-enterprise regime that the Founders created to a statist, big-government regime that will curb liberty in the name of redistributionist “fairness” and will burden their children and grandchildren with impoverishing public debt.

Indeed, this is stirring stuff. The bloated government and its “swarms of officers” that “harass our people, and eat out their substance” isn't just the exaggerations of a disaffected few, it's a documented reality. But however stirring the rhetoric I don't find it altogether compelling. Self rule means that we are free to change our system. If we have as a society decided that we find the benefits of a bloated civil service that consumes great amounts of our substance while producing little if anything of value to be worth the cost then we have no obligation to preserve the old system.

I object, but not out of reverence for the past. I admire those ancestors for their wisdom and bravery, and study their ideas in an attempt to better understand the subtlety and depth of their insights, but we live here and now. Our task is the same as theirs: we rule ourselves, even if that means that the system we prefer is different than the one they founded. The defect in the current behaviors of the government is that the policies are bad, not that they are different than would result from better conformance to our historical system. I object because the current administration is stupid, and is stupidly pursuing policies that will diminish us.