[Dave]

How are any of those weird?

[Cheesecake_Marmalade]

That's a good question. Seems normal, especially after living in california.

[NYYS]

Expelling Latinos? Anti-Black sentiments?

Huh? I admit I only briefly scanned the articles, but I didn't see either of those.

[Dave]

I have no idea where he got those from at all, maybe C_M's post about 60s riots harming black communities?

[SaulOhio]

Its just an attempt to discredit the movement through slander. Or is it libel?

There were whites and blacks, and I think a few latinos at the Cleveland tea party. One of the speakers said he was gratified to see so many people of different backgrounds and colors.

The political left cannot deal with these protests as they are, so they have to re-imagine them as something else.

[Paradigm]

How do you libertarians feel about authoritarian conservatives like Hannity hijacking these protests(which were previously associated with the Ron Paul movement)?

[SaulOhio]

I don't see them being "hijacked" by anyone. I was at one of the Tea Parties, and the main message was freedom, not authoritarianism.

Also, Don Bordeaux answers Paul Krugman's tirade better than I could:

Tea-d Off

Paul Krugman criticizes the anti-tax tea parties to be held around the country on Wednesday ("Tea Parties Forever," April 13). But Mr. Krugman's message never rises above tabloid journalism. Rather than address the issues, he merely rehashes absurdities spewed (mostly years ago) by right-wingers such as Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. The implication is that, because the likes of Messrs. DeLay and Rove oppose higher taxes, persons who attend these tea parties must be similarly crazy partisans.

But is it really so absurd for ordinary Americans to be furious that Uncle Sam now promises to run up $9.3 trillion in debt during the next decade - an unfathomable sum that will inevitably lead to much higher taxes or higher inflation or both? Is it small-minded to oppose corporate welfare for automakers, banks, and insurance companies? Is it lunatic to fear further socialization of medical-care provision? Do these concerns really signal that those of us who hold them are, as Mr. Krugman alleges, "refusing to grow up"?

One need not agree with the tea-partiers to concede that these worries are ones that reasonable people can, and do, have.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

[Le Rouge]

I know several Teapartiers personally and they all either hate or are terrified of Black people and want to expel Latinos regardless of place of birth.

[Dave]

Maybe find an article about that and start a thread?

Just FYI everyone I was just hit with a tax audit from the Wis Dept. of Revenue

Go teaparties!

[Maxim Litvinov]

Who are you guys protesting against again?

Is it the extremist capitalist risk-takers who brought about the global financial crisis through providing mortgages that couldn't reasonably be repaid?

Or is it the extremist capitalists, like the former head of Goldman-Sachs, who decided that despite the fact nationalisation and bailouts were not in their ideological vocabulary, that allowing something like AIG to go under would be unforgiveable - ie. the extreme capitalists of the Bush administration that decided a bailout was preferable to complete collapse?

Or is it the economists of the present administration who have just continued on with similar fiscal policy in order to save your country from the worst effects that the system has brought about?


It all makes little sense. You'd have to be a nutter to think of Paulson as a communist, to think that you'd have been better off if the Bush administration had not helped save major financial institutions (and, in the process, millions of Americans) or to think that you'd be better off had Congress never passed the Paulson/Bernanke moves. You'd have to be just profiteering from your compatriots' misery to claim all of this is somehow connected to Democrats liking taxation though.

[Dave]

I'm protesting all of the above

Thanks for that long post though

[NYYS]

I think they were protesting people who don't know anything about finance or economics but hold strong ideological positions anyway

oh hi max it's been a while!

[Maxim Litvinov]

They are protesting the original participants in the Boston Tea Party? Or the members of Congress who voted against the Paulson/Bernanke stimulus?

It would be rather strange to protest against someone calling an ambulance to take you to hospital thus averting your death on the basis that ambulances cost money. It would likewise be rather strange to protest against having the economy bailed out because it costs money to stop things being even more majorly fucked.

[SaulOhio]

Max: They are protesting against people like you who believe that the crisis was caused by free market capitalism and that government intervention is necessary to get us out of it. That is the ideology that is behind the big bailouts.

You still believe all that junk about capitalism being responsible, despite all the evidence posted on this forum about the government intervention specifically intended to provide more money for home loans?

Does this mean nothing to you?:


We Told You So by Mark Thornton

Does it make any difference to you that Austrian economists saw this coming, despite other economists, monetarists and Keynesians, thinking the business cycle was a thing of the past?

Christopher Meyer:

The strong housing market has all the makings of being the next bubble – in particular high leverage and unsustainable price increases. While the larger economy seems to sputter along, the housing market continues to run a hot race. Low interest rates have propelled refinancing, freeing up $100 billion last year alone, according to the Wall Street Journal. Not surprisingly, the low interest rates have increased buying power and supported housing prices. (2003)

A year later Shostak (2004) warned that there “is a strong likelihood that the U.S. housing market bubble has already reached dangerous dimensions.” While early warnings can be a problem for investors in home-building stocks, the problems of predicting the timing and magnitude of bubbles and business cycles affects all forecasters, and Shostak’s warning was primarily for the purpose of judging public policy. In effect he was noting that policymakers have made a mistake that they should correct immediately and not make the situation in the housing market any worse.

Mark Thornton

Signs of a "new era" in housing are everywhere. Housing construction is taking place at record rates. New records for real estate prices are being set across the country, especially on the east and west coasts. Booming home prices and record low interest rates are allowing homeowners to refinance their mortgages, "extract equity" to increase their spending, and lower their monthly payment! As one loan officer explained to me: "It's almost too good to be true." In fact, it is too good to be true. (2004c)

We are protesting the bailouts BECAUSE BAILOUTS DON'T WORK!

Its like having an ambulance arrive and out jumps a witch doctor with a mask on, and he starts dancing before taking out a knife to bleed you and let all the evil humours out, while you are already bleeding to death. Thats what we are protesting.

[Maxim Litvinov]

There are a number of problems with that.

[1] The tea parties are not in fact organised by some group of extremist economists or similar who have been prophesying the problems in the economic system since the pre-meltdown era. Instead, they are being organised by a ragtag group of general extremists and Republicans with the objective of complaining about high taxes, because that's an easy and opportunistic way to take advantage of present conditions.
[2] Given this, the position of many, if not most, partakers in these rallies must be disingenuous - they supported a Bush administration whose policies according to you led to this disaster, then stayed silent while that same administration oversaw economic resuscitation as a result of the disaster but they are now complaining when an administration which has inherited the disaster proceeds to start making them pay the necessary cost for the past decade.
[3] Even at my most gracious, an objective view of the cause of the crisis could only be that the jury is out. On the one hand, the government has always been involved in the economy, so in any Whodunit? is always a potential suspect. In this case though, without the government changing its policies - ie. as a result of private companies' actions - a number of your biggest companies/corporations managed to construct a bubble and then burst it. AIG, Lehmann Bros. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and many others managed to get themselves into dire situations.
[4] While it's certainly clear that private companies engaging in high-risk and unsustainable behaviour was at least part of the problem (if not necessarily the entire problem) this is really quite irrelevant to the debate at hand - where the question has to be whether Paulson was right to try to sure up the system as of late last year or just to let your whole finance system collapse. The effect of the bills in question according to all reasonable commentators I know of has been to sure up the system. The effect of the bill on the Dow Jones has been clear - when it was initially (unexpectedly) rejected, the index suffered its biggest ever one-day fall. Contrary to what you suggest, the numbers, mainstream commentary and the international community all reject your line - the bailout has had an effect, and it's been a positive one.
[5] So it comes down to a bunch of political opportunists playing off the natural disinclination for average citizens to pay their share of the clean-up costs - costs that have accrued because Americans have been living outside their means for so long. It's a cheap shot, not a scholarly one, not an intellectually coherent one and one that has at its heart the false notion that America would have been better off had her financial system taken a much bigger collapse last year.

[SaulOhio]

There are a lot of problems with what you are saying, but the biggest is with #2:

[2] Given this, the position of many, if not most, partakers in these rallies must be disingenuous - they supported a Bush administration whose policies according to you led to this disaster, then stayed silent
while that same administration oversaw economic resuscitation as a result of the disaster but they are now complaining when an administration which has inherited the disaster proceeds to start making them pay the necessary cost for the past decade.

Taxes have not even YET been raised. But the protestors know they will be, they MUST be, because SPENDING IS INCREASING! Obama actually criticized the Bush administration for increasing government spending to record amounts, and most of the people who protested at the Tea Parties agree. But with Obama, this is the black hole calling the kettle black. Yeah, the kettle is black, Bush did increase spending, but Obama went and left Bosh behind in his first months in office. The protestors know who is going to pay the bill for all this spending in the future--THEY are!

Some signs seen at the Tea Parties or suggested by the organizers:

TARP = $750 Billion
Stimulus = $870 Billion
2009 Deficit = $1.75 Trillion
U.S. Dollar = WORTHLESS!!

“Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.” Wendell Phillips

Save trees, stop printing money

Wall Street got a bailout and all I got was the bill


No Spending Without Deliberation

No Spending Without Deliberative Representation


Pay for Your OWN Mortgage

Free Markets, Not Free Loaders


We don't want pork, We Want Liberty

Special Interest Get the Pork, We Get the Beans.

No Public Money for Private Failure


You Can’t Borrow to Prosperity

Don’t Mortgage the Future

Solve Problems, Don’t Sweep Them Under the Table

These people did NOT support Bush's spending policies. I have heard a number of them complaining that Bush never used his veto power at all to reign in government spending.

Get a clue about the people you are criticizing.

[Maxim Litvinov]

These people did NOT support Bush's spending policies.

Wrong. These people are a ragtag mob of economic illiterates and political opportunists. Some may have opposed everything Bush did, but for the most part they are Republican extremists and right-wing elites who are looking for any excuse to attack Obama.

Again though, what are they arguing against? They are arguing against spending money now to alleviate a clearly existing problem. They WEREN'T having their tea parties while Bush was spending out of his arse on such wondrous policies as the War in Iraq, they WEREN'T having their tea parties when even Bush's conservative fiscal team said that a stimulus package was necessary to save the US financial system... yet when Obama comes in - well, let's crack open a tin of Earl Grey!

Any more deliberation over the Bush-backed stimulus package as the banners proclaim would have led to much more substantial problems - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and AIG stayed afloat precisely because of immediate government intervention. What these disingenuous opportunists wanted is obviously for your financial system to be even more fucked than it is now.

[RonPaulalways]

Wrong. These people are a ragtag mob of economic illiterates and political opportunists.

And Maxim tries to belittle the real people's movement in favor of the big government politicians and their huge bailouts of entrenched corporate interests.

Again though, what are they arguing against? They are arguing against spending money now to alleviate a clearly existing problem.

So deficit spending and more regulations is going to solve America's economic problems how?

How is it that you always find yourself siding with the political insiders in the halls of power and against the ordinary person?

A socialist is the man of the tyrant, not a man of the people, trying to belittle the protestors asking simply for the heavy load of debt and taxes that the government is imposing on them to be lifted.

Maxim, how on earth is the US going to be able to pay for the $1.75 trillion projected deficit that the Democrats' budget will create?

[tallpaul]

The political left cannot deal with these protests as they are, so they have to re-imagine them as something else.

You hit the nail on the head.

Unable to accept that such a large number of Americans are unhappy with the course being plotted in DC, the left dreams up things such as the protesters being manipulated by some unseen powerful force.

[Maxim Litvinov]

And Maxim tries to belittle the real people's movement

How is it a real people's movement? It's organised by elites and attended by a select few. It's astroturfing, sponsored by conservative elites. If we're talking 'people's movements', then Obama's election campaign, as stage-managed as it was, is much more an example of grassroots support.

There was no tea party when Bush was spending big in the economic up-times. No tea party when the government was collecting taxes last year. No tea party when Paulson - the conservative economist - decided that a bailout was required. No tea party when the stock market responded positively to the bailout. But when most Americans are getting prepared to pay less in income tax than they have in previous years under Obama... well, apparently the 'grassroots' of America have had enough with being taxed so highly. Please - people are not this naive.

So deficit spending and more regulations is going to solve America's economic problems how?

Deficit spending is the most responsible course of action in economic down times. That's generally acknowledged. The particular bailout spending was necessary and needed urgently to prop up major institutions - ones that are at the core of the US financial system - institutions that ordinary people rely upon.

This Fox News-induced miasma of ignorance which states the average American would have been better off if Wall Street really *had* collapsed is sheer lunacy.