Monday, July 5, 2010

LTC Allen West Speaks To A Florida Tea Party, July 3, 2010

Under ten minutes, and worth every second of that time.

5 comments:

  1. Oh, right, okay...immediately before I post my WTF is everybody comment, "Julie" comes along and makes me the fool!

    Hi Julie....I agree, Lieutenant Colonel West is cool....I just hope he doesn't entangle himself too much with the "Tea Party" talking heads (a distinct minority of TP folk)....he's much better than that.

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  2. Ari, Tea Party is like Fight Club... the first rule of Tea Party is you don't talk about Tea Party...

    As to the dearth of comments, I notice that there is always a mid-week slump. Comes from people here having, you know, lives and stuff...

    And as for LTC West - I'm encouraged that his stump speech is mostly economic, and pretty pitch perfect - as far as he goes.

    I think the challenge for the Camellia Insurgency (CI) is to articulate a populist economic platform which fiercely defends free market principles without becoming - whether by naivete or betrayal - shills for huge corporate interests.

    I don't mean to demonize all large corporate activity - it's the co-habitation with the State which is most pernicious.

    My own sentiments are positively Randian when it comes to entrepreneurs and small businesses, but decidedly less so when market capitalization starts to exceed a couple billion (putting said corporations in the Fortune 500).

    The problem with mega corps is not over or under regulation, but mal-regulation - regulation which does not address the ostensible purpose of the regulation, but instead forms a barrier for smaller companies and serves to entrench incumbent politicians.

    So instead of actual industrialists and political leaders, we are left with mutually-reinforcing classes of rent-seekers.

    Now that is too broad a brush and too cynical for over generalization, but it _is_ a dynamic which is at work at the macro level. (This dynamic can happen in small towns as well, to be sure - I've seen disgusting examples in the town I grew up in - but I'm not certain it's as much of a problem in general).

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  3. Um, ok, that should be S&P 500 above, not Fortune 500.

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  4. Lewy, the first rule of Randian sentiment is you don't talk about Randian sentiment... :p

    I'm crazy about Allen West. I don't think he'll hitch his wagon to the self-appointed leaders of the "hot beverage get-together that shall not be named".

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