The Modern Prometheus: A Halloween Story

It’s Halloween.  Time for my annual attempt at political satire (see last year’s effort here).  Apologies to Mary Shelly, Monty Python and Buck Henry.

Setting: A laboratory located in a decrepit castle in Eastern Europe.  Test tubes and electrical transformers fill the room.  Outside, a thunderstorm rages.  The year is 1789.

Dr. Madison: It’s alive!  It’s alive!  They all called me “mad,” but I have done what no man has done before!

Igor: Master, what is this creature?

Dr. Madison: I have transplanted the brain of John Locke into the body of the Magna Carta.  I engrafted bits and pieces of Montesquieu, and gave the body a transfusion of Polybius’ treatise on the Roman Empire.  Then, I immersed the body in a vat of the Iroquois Constitution and applied a charge of electricity.  And it lives!  This is a great day!

Igor (looking out the window): I don’t think everyone agrees with you.

A large mob of men carrying torches bursts into the laboratory.  They are dressed in simple peasant attire except, oddly, all are wearing safety goggles.

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Best of the Blogs: One Lump or Two?

November 2 is fast approaching, and the nation is awaiting the election results to see whether the Tea Party Movement will be revealed to be a force in American politics or an over-hyped media sensation.  This week’s “Best of the Blogs” feature provides everything a political junkie needs to learn more about the Tea Party Movement.

The obvious starting point might be Butch Cassidy’s (or Paul Newman’s) famous question, “Who are those guys?”  Amy Gardner at the Washington Post tries to answer that question here (hat tip to Steven Easley).  Despite her best efforts, a definitive picture of the Movement remains elusive:

[A] new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

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Tea Party Economics

Readers of this Blog know that I have a longstanding interest in the debate over the scope of the federal government’s power to regulate the economy under the Constitution.  I am also inclined to take the Tea Party Movement seriously as a political phenomenon rather than writing them off as a group of buffoons or extremists, unworthy of attention.  For that reason, I read with some interest Kate Zernike’s article in the New York Times  on October 2 that discussed the writers whose books are most often said comprise the intellectual foundation of the Tea Party movement. 

Taking pride of place among the “long-ago texts” highlighted in the article is Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom.  Hayek is often cited by the movement’s followers for his argument that a government that intervenes in the economy will inevitably intervene in every aspect of its citizen’s lives.  If one accepts this premise, it is easy to understand why members of the Tea Party Movement reacted with hostility to the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP), health care reform, and the bailout of the domestic auto industry.  For Tea Party followers, these separate policies – when viewed together — comprise a centrally planned economy reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s infamous Five Year Plans.

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