Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (10 page)

I can’t imagine a less libertarian attitude toward the process of truth-seeking and opinion-making than this. I also can’t imagine a Declaration of Independence without “rabble-rousers” like Samuel Adams and pamphleteers like Thomas Paine. Neither was deemed “suitable for polite company,” then. But it is hard to imagine our great nation, conceived in liberty, without them.

In defending the centralized model, both Lindsey and Brooks demonstrate the very essence of the problem. Our political culture is built around an insiders-only philosophy. It’s not a good deal for readers to only have access to what David Brooks’s insider friends are thinking. We don’t want or need someone to tell us, as the final word on the matter, what they think is true based on their inside-the-Beltway friendships. We don’t need journalists who reinforce the status quo and perpetuate the insiders-only mentality by working within the broken system. We need access to information and the freedom to decide for ourselves how best to change the system and reshape it.

If Walter Cronkite said the wrong thing on the
CBS Evening News,
it became “the truth.” There was no one to fact-check him, other than internal ombudsmen and colleagues at other outlets who were all part of the same centralized information machine. There was practically nowhere else to turn. In contrast, if a blogger says the wrong thing on his website, ten of his friends—and more of his opponents—will correct him within minutes, often in the most unsubtle of terms. Talk about creative destruction. Entire websites exist to debunk Internet rumors and urban legends. (It took the
New York Times
fifteen years to notice Snopes.com, one of the most popular rumor-debunking sites on the Web.
35
) The nature of the Internet is such that even the fact-checkers are fact-checked again and again.

If the successful blogger Ace of Spades—the man in the black pajamas, a worthy adversary—gets the story wrong, Ed Morrissey at
HotAir
gleefully flames him with a furrowed brow, better information, and another link. When the
New York Times
gets it wrong, Julie Borowski, with her Sony Bloggie camera, captures the story and posts it on YouTube, where it is immediately picked up by Michelle Malkin and by
RedState
. If this seems like chaos, it’s the beautiful chaos of Jeffersonian democracy setting “them to rights.”

Freedom, and the discovery process driven by millions of free people, is the best way to get to the truth of things. It is the “greater social intelligence” that results from our natural tendency to act, to discover, make mistakes, adjust, refine, and move forward. This is what fundamentally differentiates my argument from the standard conservative complaint against the liberal media. It’s not that the left-leaning mainstream media are always wrong and that Fox News and Glenn Beck are always right. My contention is that freedom works better, and an open-ended system of aggressive competition will produce a fuller understanding of what is actually going on in the world. As Beck says: “It’s about the individual.” It’s not us versus them. It’s about them serving us.

DRINK YOUR TEA

A
S
T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON FORESHADOWED IN HIS LETTER TO
R
ICHARD
Price in 1789, a well-informed public is likely to notice when the government is getting it wrong, and has a right to do something about it. One CNBC commentator’s cable tirade about mortgage bailouts, “The Rant Heard ’Round the World,” helped brand and galvanize an entire movement.

“How many people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgages that have an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Rick Santelli asked from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange during a regular appearance on
Squawk Box
on February 19, 2009. “Raise your hand! President Obama, are you listening? . . . You know Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now they’re driving ’54 Chevys. . . . We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July, all you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”
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There are roughly 180 “Rick Santelli Rant” videos on YouTube, with well over 2 million combined views, and countless other versions of the video posted on other sites. (CNBC doesn’t publish its online view counts.) A Google search for “Rick Santelli Rant” returns 119,000 results. While elements of what became known as the Tea Party were operating well before February 2009, Santelli is widely credited with issuing the call to action that inspired so many people to make it the movement it is today. Unintentionally, Santelli linked an already burgeoning movement to its own revolutionary heritage, a set of tried-and-true values based on freedom, and a Whig intellectual tradition that put the individual first in the pecking order. The Tea Party, in the words of Van Jones, became our “meta-brand.”

Without the Internet to fan the flames of Santelli’s rant, spreading it across the country in mere hours, few people beyond the 185,000 who were watching
Squawk Box
in early 2009 would have ever seen it.
37

This phenomenon, by the way, isn’t restricted to the political Right. Occupy Wall Street was another movement that masterfully utilized Internet tools to organize its protests and spreads it messages. Indeed, the Left realized the tremendous potential of the Internet long before the modern Tea Party existed. In 2003, during the Democratic presidential primary, Howard Dean galvanized an entire movement into action through unprecedented use of the Internet—and scared the daylights out of establishment Democrats. Though Dean flamed out with one spectacular scream, the movement he spawned did not, and it could be argued that the people-powered grassroots that donated millions to a first-term senator from Illinois, and which eventually coalesced around the OWS movement, began with Dean in 2003.

Nor is it playing out only in America. The Arab Spring of 2011 and other protest movements were fueled by the free exchange of information on social media sites like Twitter. The sites not only empowered protesters to organize; they also kept supporters around the world updated on the news coming out of countries notorious for controlling the messaging of official press outlets.

Just as we no longer have a need for a centralized clearinghouse of information in the form of a news cartel, the power of political parties has diminished. Before the information revolution, we needed centralized parties to find candidates, raise money, buy ads, craft messaging, and organize supporters. Now we can do all that for ourselves. The people can connect directly with one another, whether through general social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, or through more niche social networks like my organization’s FreedomConnector.

Remember, information is not knowledge. There are simply too many bits of information out there for any single mind to know; even if you are the editorial page editor at the
New York Times
or the information czar at the head of the Federal Communications Commission. Even a properly progressive president “talking to experts” who “potentially have the best answer” doesn’t have the best information at his disposal. Knowledge is “personal,” in the words of philosopher Michael Polanyi,
and only through interaction, cooperation, and competition can we ever get from here to there.
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Remember also that knowledge is not wisdom. Our personal knowledge of time and place—what is happening in our lives and with our family in our local community—is part of what we use to figure things out as everything changes around us. We also depend on things that don’t change very often, institutions and rules that guide our actions in an uncertain world. Laws such as “don’t hurt others” are a product of human action but not of human design, and they represent common wisdom that has made sense for a long time. We need both knowledge and a little wisdom for freedom to work.

Walter Cronkite, or “news-like websites”? “Serious journalists,” or the Ace of Spades? Top-down or bottom-up? Keep your top-down solutions, Walter. I’m clinging to my individual sovereignty and my RSS feed.

CHAPTER 4
D
ON’T
H
URT
O
THERS AND
D
ON’T
T
AKE
T
HEIR
S
TUFF

V
AN
J
ONES IS BAFFLED.
S
TANDING AT THE PODIUM, HE IS THE MAIN
event, speaking to a full house at Netroots Nation 2011. The audience is clearly on his side. Jones is one of the most important community organizers in the progressive movement, and he is trying to wrap his mind around the notion of freedom-loving individualists working together toward a common end, “collectively.” “Here’s the hypocrisy, the irony,” Jones says. “They talk rugged individualism—that’s their whole schtick, right? This is the Tea Party. ‘If you had a problem, don’t look to the government. Just be more rugged, and more individual and your problem will be solved.’ That’s their schtick, rugged individualism.”
1

If you have heard of Van Jones, it is likely because of his short stint as the “green jobs czar” in the Obama administration. In the bizarre world we live in today, apparently “green jobs”—like those illusory jobs “created” at Solyndra with Obama stimulus dollars—require their own special czar, someone who can really take charge and fix things. Jones describes himself as a “globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean energy economy.”
2
Jones’s support for radical socialism and his dabbling in 9/11 Trutherism resulted in his swift excision from the administration. He now markets himself as a “leading champion of smart solutions for America’s middle class” and a “successful, innovative and award-winning social entrepreneur.” That sounds a lot safer than his earlier days of progressive radicalism. These days, however, he mostly spends his time trying to replicate the decentralized grassroots power of the Tea Party and teach his fellow progressives to be more like us.

THE PARTY LABEL

V
AN
J
ONES USED TO BE A SOCIALIST, BUT “SOCIALIST” IS NO LONGER
the preferred nomenclature of the far Left in American politics; indeed, they get quite testy about the label. In the early twentieth century, the American Progressive movement closely identified with socialism, and the politics of the Bull Moose Party and Teddy Roosevelt always involved more government power and control over individuals and the private means of production. Eventually, Americans figured out what the progressive agenda was really all about, so in the FDR era progressives co-opted the word
liberal,
which was audacious, since
liberal
then still meant something akin to “the federal government should mind its constitutional limits and its own damn business.” Later, “liberal” became associated with the Left’s own big government failures, so unpopular that the Left had to give up that label as well. So today, Democrats and the broad array of left-wing interests that make up their coalition are no longer “liberals”; they are once again “progressives.”

The new progressives passionately disavow the “socialist” lineage of their failed ideology. The president himself, piqued by the question, went out of his way to tell the
New York Times
that he was “not a socialist.”
3
Of course, a rose by any other name is still a rose, and “socialism” refers to a system of economic organization where government owns the means of production. Like car companies, or the provision of health insurance, or seats on the governing board of investment banks. In fairness, maybe their real goal is government
control
, rather than ownership, of the means of production. But that system of economic organization effectively functions in the very same way, and has its own history of catastrophic failure. Just ask the Italians.

But whatever you do, do
not
call them “socialist.” It’s not polite.

Progressives pursue government ownership/control of the means of production because their philosophy is based on the belief that government can know better and plan better than free individuals could ever do on their own. Progressives have a plan for everything, and they want to reorganize things and redistribute your hard-earned money to their ends. It’s all a means toward their definition of “social justice.” The American definition of “justice,” from the Founders and the traditions of classical liberalism back to the Scottish Enlightenment and beyond, has always meant treating each individual just like every other individual under the laws of the land, “with liberty and justice for all.” “Social justice,” as far as anyone can tell, always requires someone presumed to be smarter than you—a government czar—telling you what you can or cannot do with yourself or your property. These are not new ideas. Imposing a better plan and second-guessing everyone else have been the fools’ errands of all would-be central planners for centuries.

So, when Van Jones and the Netroots Nation label Tea Partiers as “rugged individualists,” you can be quite certain they are not paying a compliment. People like Jones don’t understand how people who value individualism can act collectively. As far as they’re concerned, only collectivists can act collectively, because only they care about their fellow man. The other guys, the rugged individualists, at best care about no one other than themselves. But the progressives suspect far worse of us: that individualists are willing to do just about anything to get ahead, regardless of who gets hurt. President Obama, an ardent aficionado of debating imaginary straw men, simply loves to set up this parody of individualism, and then knock it right down. Coincidentally, he invoked the ominous specter of “rugged individualism” just a few months after Van Jones spoke at Netroots Nation. On December 6, 2011, Obama spoke to a campaign rally in Osawatomie, Kansas:

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes—especially for the wealthy—our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.
4

Freedom “doesn’t work,” says Obama. A lot of this is just textbook Chicago politics—literally. Saul Alinsky, Obama’s mentor and the founding father of leftist community organizers, wrote about how to effectively demonize your opponent regardless of the facts. Alinsky’s Thirteenth “Rule for Radicals” states: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
5
Dutifully, the president has set up a straw man to polarize. Rugged individualism: bad.

On one level, you have to assume that Van Jones’s and others’ bewilderment about the Tea Party is disingenuous, for as progressives they are not terribly interested in understanding how freedom works. They ask, à la Alinsky, how do I demonize freedom effectively so that the public turns to my agenda of more government and the redistribution of wealth?

But on a more fundamental level, Van Jones really is baffled.
How did those rugged individualists pull it off?
It’s not just that he doesn’t understand
how
we could work together, but
why
we would work together for the seemingly individualistic goals we have set. This is part and parcel of the hubris, arrogance, and lack of humility that are ingrained in the ethos of big government. Do they really believe that free people won’t care about others unless compelled, from the top down? Do they really believe that people won’t cooperate unless guided by a master plan?

So, true to instincts, Jones needs a plan to counter this thing called the Tea Party, even if he’s not sure what it actually is. What might community organizers do to counter the obvious effectiveness of the Tea Party movement, particularly when it comes to its measurable impact on driving public opinion and getting out the vote?

If you are a planner, you believe that you can fix it, no matter what the “it” is. “Just give me your power and your cash; I’m the man for the job.” A program, an earmark, a green jobs czar—each of these is presumed to be a better alternative to letting market forces punish bad behavior and reward the good.

This attitude requires action, even if it’s destructive. In political discourse, it is a given that those in power, or those seeking power, will make promises and propose new programs funded with your money. Will the programs work? Likely not, but it really does not matter, because more funding for education, as an example, even if it is putting good money after bad, is a proposal to do
something.
The response is not always so simple, because an alternative to the
educratic
status quo, based on empowering parents with individual choice, is often a prospective expectation of what would happen if we let freedom work. It requires a bit of vision, and for elected officials, the courage of your convictions (if you brought such things with you to Washington, D.C., in the first place).

This is the flip side of Bastiat’s
seen and unseen
in public policy.
6
We can see, clearly, a $535 million earmark to fund green jobs at Solyndra, at least for a while, until our attentions are drawn elsewhere and the company goes belly-up. We can’t see, by definition, the opportunity cost, the path not taken, if government had not misappropriated those resources.

So what’s the plan, Van?

It seems to be Occupy Wall Street, at least as an opening bid. One essential characteristic of the progressive mind-set is a willingness to just toss an idea against the wall, hoping it sticks like spaghetti. Though Jones did not create Occupy Wall Street, he certainly has stuck to it. “They’ve got moral clarity,” Jones says of OWS. “They’re as clear as a bell, and that’s what’s been missing. You should not ask folks who have been hurting, sitting on a white hot stove for three years . . . to holler properly.”
7

Attached at the hip, now Jones himself faces the same dilemma—the seen and the unseen of progressive principles—in the increasingly unpopular behavior of his values put into practice. This is why the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a cause to be celebrated among progressives and their leaders, proved such a vivid and useful experiment in their values applied, and the practical results of top-down collectivism. The OWS movement was lionized by the mainstream media and liberal politicians from the get-go. It was celebrated by Hollywood stars, bona fide one-percenters like Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin, and Kanye West.

Occupy Wall Street was also a living, breathing manifestation of the values of redistribution and class envy put to practice. Or should I say petri dish?

THE GREAT DIVIDE

A
T FIRST BLUSH,
I
WANTED TO LIKE
O
CCUPY
W
ALL
S
TREET
. H
AVING
suffered the isolation of being one of the very few opposing the 2008 Wall Street bailout—TARP—from inside the Beltway, I felt their pain. I shared their outrage. I wished they had been there on the streets when we were fighting—against both Republicans and Democrats—the bailouts of irresponsible fat-cat investment bankers and dishonest home-flippers. We needed help then, as everyone, including Senator Barack Obama, lined up like panicked lemmings and wrote an unconstitutional blank check to an unelected Treasury bureaucrat (who happened to be the former chairman of Goldman Sachs) to “fix it.”

I wanted to understand Occupy Wall Street, particularly for students and young graduates already underwater with college tuition debt and with few prospects of employment. Chronic unemployment rates over 8 percent are particularly punishing to new job entrants, and the double whammy of debt and joblessness creates a dark outlook for the Millennial Generation, who had been so optimistic about the promises of “hope” and “change” they were fed during the Obama campaign.

I wanted to connect, somehow, with Occupy Wall Street. Indeed, friends who attended the first rallies saw signs lifted straight from any one of the Tea Parties that I had personally attended. “End the Fed.” “Stop Crony Capitalism.” Was there a potential populist meeting of the minds? Had some on the Left finally reached the same conclusion that we had, that the unholy collusion between big business and big government undermines growth and opportunity for everyone unlucky enough not to have some special relationship with a Senate committee chairman or the U.S. Treasury secretary? Could we together take on the bottom-feeding politicians who wallow in the economic bog created by government-granted privilege?

Would they join in a hostile takeover bid of Big Government, Incorporated?

At the time of the initial protests in October 2011, I happened to be in Sestri Levante, Italy, giving a talk on the decentralized nature of the Tea Party to European graduate students participating in the Istituto Bruno Leoni’s annual Ludwig von Mises Seminar. The students wanted to know my take on OWS, and I was eagerly talking to friends on the ground back in the States. Was it possible that many of the same troops organizing for Obama were now rejecting his cozy relationship with corporate rent-seekers?