At The Seattle Tea Party

I WENT DOWN to the Seattle Tea Party at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle on April 15, 2009. It was organized and hosted by Liberty Belle Keli Carender.

This is what I saw, at about 6:15 pm.

It was a jovial occasion. People cheered at the idea of lower taxes and spending, and booed at the mention of Democrats like Jim McDermott and Patti Murray.

My takeaway was that the folks attending are good old mainstream Americans. They weren’t country club Republicans. They weren’t Randian individualists. They were just folks, and a lot of them seemed to be women-of-a-certain-age. They were, if they were anything, the Reagan Democrats that came over to the Republican side in the 1980s.

It set me to thinking. These folks haven’t been well served by the politics of the last 20 years, the years since Ronald Reagan stepped down as president.

They probably didn’t benefit in the tech boom. They probably didn’t cash in on the housing boom. They probably aren’t going to have much savings, not after the meltdown, and they probably aren’t going to benefit from the Obama initiatives in health care, education, and “smart energy.”

How can we help these folks? We can help them by steadying the economy. The boom economy of the past few years and the bailout economy of the next year or two are not good for ordinary people. The present setup benefits the people that are fast on their feet. It does not benefit ordinary people who go to work, live by the rules, and pay their taxes.

We need an America that has cranked down the risk factor. It’s not that hard to do:

Let’s crank down the debt economy. Less debt; more equity. That starts with the government.
Let’s crank down the government monopolies in health and education.
Let’s crank down the subsidies in energy, transportation, agriculture, and in other ways big and small that don’t even come up on the radar.

In a high octane economy, you have to be fast on your feet to do well, or you need to sign up under a powerful patron. That’s not the economy for a free society. It’s an economy that benefits well-connected liberals and their patronage clients.

Let’s do the right thing for America. For a change.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.