Tea Party

[Kat]

I'm glad that some Objectivists are active in the tea parties. It is a great platform to get our ideas out there to people who have some common goals. Get involved and don't hand over the tea party to the social conservatives and keep speaking out for individual rights and a small fiscally responsible government. The Tea Party Patriots is also the group that sponsors the Chicago Tea Party and is a good group which includes a good amount of more libertarian types.

Yaron Brook gave a wonderful speech at a recent Tea Party Patriots event.

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Keynote speech at the 4th of July Boston Tea Party event (in 2 parts) "Commit yourselves to becoming principled advocates for liberty. Commit yourselves to becoming principled advocates for individual rights, but most importantly, commit yourselves to making the most out of your life, for being the best you can be in your life, and for spreading that idea the idea of rational self-interest...The idea that you own your own life..."

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[syrakusos]

Yaron Brook delivers a good speech. However, the demographics of the Tea Party (revealed here from the Mises Institute) suggest that they are unlikely to give up God and endorse a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. As Brook notes, the Constitution is based on a principle of rights. However, that principle itself rests on egocentric ethics, and objective (rational-empiricist) epistemology and metaphysics.

We here on OL have the intellectual caliber (some of us) to understand that foundation of the Enlightenment was the work of Galileo and Newton, not Locke and Hobbes. Important though Locke was to the Founders of our Quadrant Republic, the fact remains that Newton was moreso.

Judging by the books on my shelves, my singlemost important author is Ayn Rand. Second is Richard Feynman. (Anyone else here read Feynman?) Feynman taught that in the search for truth, it is important not to kid yourself.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael,

While it is correct that the demographics of the Tea Party at present suggest the majority are religious and are pro-life, it should be noted that these issues are never part of Tea Party platforms (at least not to my knowledge).

Maybe some branch or other might include this stuff, but the major branches don't. The Tea Party people I have met consider these things as issues of free choice, not government, even when they have strong views on them.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Judging by the books on my shelves, my singlemost important author is Ayn Rand. Second is Richard Feynman. (Anyone else here read Feynman?) Feynman taught that in the search for truth, it is important not to kid yourself.

R. P. Feynman. My Hero! Along with several other top of the line physicists and mathematicians. Feynman, however, was probably the best teacher of physics and the scientific way of thinking that ever came from the ranks of Nobel Award class physicists. Most top theoretical physicists are not particularly good teachers.

Feynman was not only a hero of physics but a hero of truth and straight talk.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[syrakusos]

Michael & Kat (and other Tea Party people), I understand and appreciate the historical relevance of a spontaneous patriotic movement of protests against big government. I did not miss the fact that many Republicans were swept into the House and Senate by having or claiming allegiance to the values of limited government. More to the point, some of those defeated party machine Republicans in primaries. I get that.

Yaron Brook speaks well and speaks about principles, political fundamentals. Many in that audience seemed to like what they heard.

Examining the record of the first session of the new Congress, it seems that not much is changing soon. Look at what happened at the very first showdown over the budget. As the Tea Party is primarily about the budget, that is disappointing. Politics is the art of making friends by making promises, and keeping the one without keeping the other.

Politics derives from ethics, ethics from epistemology, and that from metaphysics. You can start anywhere - with aesthetics, if you will, but it comes back to fundamentals in philosophy. The core issues for the Tea Party movement are the Bush/Obama corporate bailouts and federally-mandated healthcare. Timely - and iconic - as those are, they are concrete, no different from any other legislation.

[studiodekadent]

We here on OL have the intellectual caliber (some of us) to understand that foundation of the Enlightenment was the work of Galileo and Newton, not Locke and Hobbes.

Two points,

1) Locke was an opponent of Hobbes. Hobbes argued that an intrusive state was required to prevent civilization from deteriorating into a war of all against all. Locke argued Hobbes was wrong. Also, I would dispute the categorization of Hobbes as an enlightenment thinker.

2) Locke was an empiricist. He wasn't perfect but he wasn't a mystic.

[BaalChatzaf]

1) Locke was an opponent of Hobbes. Hobbes argued that an intrusive state was required to prevent civilization from deteriorating into a war of all against all. Locke argued Hobbes was wrong. Also, I would dispute the categorization of Hobbes as an enlightenment thinker.

2) Locke was an empiricist. He wasn't perfect but he wasn't a mystic.

Thomas Hobbes was a materialist and an empiricist. He also made a strong argument for government.

Ba'al Chatzaf