I live in Oregon… but today I stand with the Ohio Tea Party.

Ladies and Gentlement of the Ohio Tea Party, aka Patriots of the highest order.

Your establishment seeks to choke the lifeblood from our movement.

So as a concerned activist of Conservative causes I seek to help restore your strength.

I need.. no that is wrong… OHIO needs 30 volunteers to step up. I would prefer 3000 to send a message, but 30 will do.

You need to walk/drive/ski/fly/crawl/surf or whatever to your elections office and you need to sign up to run as a Precinct Committee Person.

This position in many States requires 3 votes to win. Yes 3!

Then you attend the vote for leadership of your State Party.

Send a clear message.

Then just try being involved in your Party. Be a force for change we can believe in!

Show them the Buckeye Spirit and clean house on them!

My original essay on the current divide between the GOP “Establishment,” on the one hand, and the Tea Party and other anti-Establishment factions, on the other, sought to explain the leading issue (the growth of spending and the size of government relative to the private sector), the proximate cause (the loss of trust that the GOP Establishment would make a serious effort to stem this tide) and the underlying history that led to the wide fissure currently visible in the party and the movement on the Right. As I noted in my followup essay, the loss of trust in the Establishment over spending is by no means the only such divide, but it’s the one that has brought longstanding tensions out in the open and has overcome the natural tendencies of Republicans and conservatives to defer to authority, hierarchy and gradualism. The break is not a sudden onset of irrationality, as some would have us believe, but an entirely rational response to a long and depressing history of failure to check the growth of federal spending, the federal entitlement state, and federal regulation, leading us to the point where our private sector can no longer carry the burden of a perpetually growing public sector.

This observation has led me into an argument with Avik Roy, a senior healthcare fellow at the Manhattan Institute, professional healthcare analyst and healthcare writer at Forbes and National Review, who insists that conservative voters who have lost faith after some six decades of unkept promises by Republican candidates to stem the tide of growth in government spending and regulation should continue to trust that this time, the promises of such politicians will be different because they have white papers and proposals that would lead to “entitlement reform” (note that Roy nowhere promises that any such reforms would actually reduce the ratio of public expenditure to private production). Roy relies on a false comparison: the fact that not all anti-Establishment candidates for office have offered substantive solutions to the growth of entitlement reform, whereas an ideal Establishment candidate would do so.

This is a straw man argument, and one that continues to ignore history, Congressional dynamics, the basics of negotiation and the actual facts of the current Presidential race. In fact, Roy’s analysis is impractical and detached from reality. The practical reality is that, without pressure and leadership from the anti-Establishment wing of the party, nothing will get done. And the long and dolorous history of prior efforts to restrain spending, entitlement spending and regulation amply justifies the mistrust of Establishment figures who offer purely theoretical solutions and refuse to take political risks to make them a reality.

Read More →

My original essay on the current divide between the GOP “Establishment,” on the one hand, and the Tea Party and other anti-Establishment factions, on the other, sought to explain the leading issue (the growth of spending and the size of government relative to the private sector), the proximate cause (the loss of trust that the GOP Establishment would make a serious effort to stem this tide) and the underlying history that led to the wide fissure currently visible in the party and the movement on the Right. As I noted in my followup essay, the loss of trust in the Establishment over spending is by no means the only such divide, but it’s the one that has brought longstanding tensions out in the open and has overcome the natural tendencies of Republicans and conservatives to defer to authority, hierarchy and gradualism. The break is not a sudden onset of irrationality, as some would have us believe, but an entirely rational response to a long and depressing history of failure to check the growth of federal spending, the federal entitlement state, and federal regulation, leading us to the point where our private sector can no longer carry the burden of a perpetually growing public sector.

This observation has led me into an argument with Avik Roy, a senior healthcare fellow at the Manhattan Institute, professional healthcare analyst and healthcare writer at Forbes and National Review, who insists that conservative voters who have lost faith after some six decades of unkept promises by Republican candidates to stem the tide of growth in government spending and regulation should continue to trust that this time, the promises of such politicians will be different because they have white papers and proposals that would lead to “entitlement reform” (note that Roy nowhere promises that any such reforms would actually reduce the ratio of public expenditure to private production). Roy relies on a false comparison: the fact that not all anti-Establishment candidates for office have offered substantive solutions to the growth of entitlement reform, whereas an ideal Establishment candidate would do so.

This is a straw man argument, and one that continues to ignore history, Congressional dynamics, the basics of negotiation and the actual facts of the current Presidential race. In fact, Roy’s analysis is impractical and detached from reality. The practical reality is that, without pressure and leadership from the anti-Establishment wing of the party, nothing will get done. And the long and dolorous history of prior efforts to restrain spending, entitlement spending and regulation amply justifies the mistrust of Establishment figures who offer purely theoretical solutions and refuse to take political risks to make them a reality.

Read More →

There’s been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about the struggle between the GOP “Establishment” and “Outsiders,” sometimes – but sometimes not – meaning the Tea Party, however defined. There are many fault lines, wheels within wheels, that divide different groups on the Right, but it’s time to clarify the core issue that has people of perfectly conservative temperament and ideology scratching their heads at their own constituents. After all, we’re conservatives: establishments are a good idea, a necessary intersection of tradition and meritocracy, giving undue weight to neither and co-opting dangerous ideas about revolution and radical change. What’s so bad about that?

The answer is a simple one: it’s almost entirely about spending. The current trajectory of American government spending is one in which spending by government in general, and by the federal government in particular, just keeps on growing as a share of the economy, further and further crowding out the space occupied by free private citizens and businesses in the private sector. Worse, much of this happens automatically, without the consent of the governed in any but the most perfunctory way: discretionary spending is designed to grow because budgets are set by using the prior year’s spending as a baseline, and entitlement and public employee benefit spending – which consume a far larger share of spending – grows by itself in the absence of any affirmative legislation to stop it. The federal government has not passed a budget in nearly 1,000 days (President Obama’s State of the Union speech will mark the 1000th), yet spending has continued to grow, and will continue to grow as far as the eye can see – a dramatic change in our country taking place on auto-pilot – unless dramatic action is taken in response to stop it. Jack’s magic beans have nothing on public spending.

And the growth of spending bleeds over into every other issue. Federal spending comes with strings attached, and those strings reduce the independence of the states and burrow the arms of the federal octopus ever further into the area of social policy. Institutions like churches, schools, and hospitals become hooked on federal money, and have to dance the federal tune. Spending gets earmarked and targeted to favored people, businesses and groups, making society less equal and government less ethical. Spending distorts energy markets, housing markets, and markets for higher education, creating bubbles and inefficiency. And that’s before we even get to the metastatic growth of federal regulation. And eventually, runaway domestic spending saps our ability to adequately fund our national defense.

There is general philosophical agreement among both Republicans and conservatives about all of this. Where the fault line lies is in exactly how far we are willing to go to do something about it. Many people who got into politics as good conservatives, and still think themselves good conservatives constrained by the limits of practical possibility, are at a loss when it comes to meaningful ways to tame Leviathan. For reasons, some good (the need to use political power to protect national security, preserve control of the courts and restrain regulatory overreach), some less so, they have thrown in the towel on the central issue of the day. That is who we speak of as the “Establishment.” Others – not always with a sense of proportion or possibility, but driven by the urgency of the cause – seek dramatic confrontations to prevent the menace of excessive spending from passing the tipping point where we can no longer save room for the private sector. They are the Outsiders, the ones challenging the system and its fundamental assumptions. The analogy of a Tea Party is an apt one: the Founding Fathers had much in common with the Tories of their day, but disagreed on a fundamental question, not of principle, but of practical politics: whether revolution was needed to protect their traditional rights as Englishmen from being eradicated by the growing encroachments of the British Crown. As it was then, the gulf between the two is the defining issue of today’s Republican Party and conservative movement.

In short, the real “Establishment” and “Outsider,” “anti-Establishment” or “Tea Party” factions are not about who is conservative or moderate, or who is inside or outside the Beltway or public office, or who has fancy degrees or a large readership/listenership or attends the right cocktail parties or churches, or even necessarily who has or has not supported various candidates. The term “Establishment” is used and abused in those contexts, but invariably describes only a division of passing significance. The real battle between the Establishment and the Outsiders is between those who urge significant changes in our spending patterns as a necessity to preserve the America we have known, and those who are unwilling to take that step. It is, in short, between those who are, and those who are not, willing to take action in the belief that the currently established structure of how public money is spent is unsustainable and must be fixed while it still can if we are not to lose by encroachments the all the other things Republicans and conservatives stand for.

Read More →

There’s been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about the struggle between the GOP “Establishment” and “Outsiders,” sometimes – but sometimes not – meaning the Tea Party, however defined. There are many fault lines, wheels within wheels, that divide different groups on the Right, but it’s time to clarify the core issue that has people of perfectly conservative temperament and ideology scratching their heads at their own constituents. After all, we’re conservatives: establishments are a good idea, a necessary intersection of tradition and meritocracy, giving undue weight to neither and co-opting dangerous ideas about revolution and radical change. What’s so bad about that?

The answer is a simple one: it’s almost entirely about spending. The current trajectory of American government spending is one in which spending by government in general, and by the federal government in particular, just keeps on growing as a share of the economy, further and further crowding out the space occupied by free private citizens and businesses in the private sector. Worse, much of this happens automatically, without the consent of the governed in any but the most perfunctory way: discretionary spending is designed to grow because budgets are set by using the prior year’s spending as a baseline, and entitlement and public employee benefit spending – which consume a far larger share of spending – grows by itself in the absence of any affirmative legislation to stop it. The federal government has not passed a budget in nearly 1,000 days (President Obama’s State of the Union speech will mark the 1000th), yet spending has continued to grow, and will continue to grow as far as the eye can see – a dramatic change in our country taking place on auto-pilot – unless dramatic action is taken in response to stop it. Jack’s magic beans have nothing on public spending.

And the growth of spending bleeds over into every other issue. Federal spending comes with strings attached, and those strings reduce the independence of the states and burrow the arms of the federal octopus ever further into the area of social policy. Institutions like churches, schools, and hospitals become hooked on federal money, and have to dance the federal tune. Spending gets earmarked and targeted to favored people, businesses and groups, making society less equal and government less ethical. Spending distorts energy markets, housing markets, and markets for higher education, creating bubbles and inefficiency. And that’s before we even get to the metastatic growth of federal regulation. And eventually, runaway domestic spending saps our ability to adequately fund our national defense.

There is general philosophical agreement among both Republicans and conservatives about all of this. Where the fault line lies is in exactly how far we are willing to go to do something about it. Many people who got into politics as good conservatives, and still think themselves good conservatives constrained by the limits of practical possibility, are at a loss when it comes to meaningful ways to tame Leviathan. For reasons, some good (the need to use political power to protect national security, preserve control of the courts and restrain regulatory overreach), some less so, they have thrown in the towel on the central issue of the day. That is who we speak of as the “Establishment.” Others – not always with a sense of proportion or possibility, but driven by the urgency of the cause – seek dramatic confrontations to prevent the menace of excessive spending from passing the tipping point where we can no longer save room for the private sector. They are the Outsiders, the ones challenging the system and its fundamental assumptions. The analogy of a Tea Party is an apt one: the Founding Fathers had much in common with the Tories of their day, but disagreed on a fundamental question, not of principle, but of practical politics: whether revolution was needed to protect their traditional rights as Englishmen from being eradicated by the growing encroachments of the British Crown. As it was then, the gulf between the two is the defining issue of today’s Republican Party and conservative movement.

In short, the real “Establishment” and “Outsider,” “anti-Establishment” or “Tea Party” factions are not about who is conservative or moderate, or who is inside or outside the Beltway or public office, or who has fancy degrees or a large readership/listenership or attends the right cocktail parties or churches, or even necessarily who has or has not supported various candidates. The term “Establishment” is used and abused in those contexts, but invariably describes only a division of passing significance. The real battle between the Establishment and the Outsiders is between those who urge significant changes in our spending patterns as a necessity to preserve the America we have known, and those who are unwilling to take that step. It is, in short, between those who are, and those who are not, willing to take action in the belief that the currently established structure of how public money is spent is unsustainable and must be fixed while it still can if we are not to lose by encroachments the all the other things Republicans and conservatives stand for.

Read More →

The words “establishment” and “outsider” are wield pretty fast and loose in presidential elections. This election is hardly unique. Not so sure we’re all on the same page though, so I thought I would clarify, at least, from my vantage point.

I’ll start with defining “outsider” by using myself as the example. I am someone who has never held public office, never worked for someone in public office, never had a friend in public office and except for noting a county councilwoman’s presence in a parking lot of the local grocers, I’ve never met someone in public office.

Then, there is the “establishment.” Not the dirty word “establishment,” but you know, the Republican establishment, Democratic establishment, Mass Media “establishment” (just go with it) which can be defined, from where I sit as voter, as a group of people with the same or similar ideological opinions (not using a dictionary here, just telling it like I see it). For example, I would group Rick Perry, Karl Rove and Ronald Reagan in to the Republican establishment. Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and Rahm Emanuel in to the Democratic establishment.

But, there is another “establishment” which is not defined by political party (although, some may be defined as subjective opinion-makers masquerading as journalists). It is defined by actions or, more often than not, as the word establishment connotes, reaction (such as, adding earmarks to a bill because everyone else is doing it: “it’s ok because they’re mine”…think Rick Santorum or “I’m pro choice, no wait, who am I talking to? I mean, I’m pro family.” Or, 2008: “Mexicans? They should all be deported.” 2012:  ”My grandfather is Mexican.”  (whisper) “Do you think that’ll get me the Hispanic vote?” Or, in a recent debate, “I’ve never seen that ad” and seconds later naming 5 things that were wrong in the ad…think Mitt Romney) and sometimes inaction (as in having self-proclaimed big ideas, but never accomplishing a thing…think Ron Paul). I believe the media-types call it, the “status quo?” They should talk, right?

This establishment type, we’ll call establishment type “B,” is someone who is only defined by the group with which they identify themselves and choose to be liked opposed to be effective. They choose to get in line with all the other establishment type B people, instead of exploring the road less traveled.

There is one Republican candidate who is a bona fide, faithful conservative. One who has worked in government, true, Rick Perry has 20 plus years of experience working his way up to leading the 13th largest economy in the world, but he is not defined by his office or swayed to drop his ideals because some “one” may not like him.

I read a great definition of Rick Perry the other day: one whose magnetic personality galvanizes people for some great cause. He can influence others not solely by his words but by his actions. He does what he preaches. He acts as a catalyst and his presence is enough to motivate people.

Rick Perry is an outlier of “establishment B.” Not quite an outsider, but definitely an outlier. He’s assimilated enough to work the establishment without the establishment working him. He is guided by social and economic conservative principles, not Party principles. Although no one in or around government can claim complete autonomic outsider status, Rick Perry is eons ahead of the current crop of Republican and Democratic candidates, from my vantage point.

No, I’m not advocating violence. I’m just observing the existence of a conflict between 2 completely irreconcilable ideas (and the people who hold them) that’s been growing for the past 100 years in America.

On one hand is the simple idea that “by the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground“. Or stated only a bit more pleasantly, that everyone should work, that earning a living must be encouraged, that charity should only be given to or accepted by people in a misfortune entirely beyond their control.

On the other hand is a century of serious intellectual effort not to accept that fact. To proclaim, in much prettier words than I’ll use here, that people are entitled simply by their existence to various things they want (a “job”, a “living wage”, “social justice”, “access to healthcare”, “decent” housing, and other items in the intellectuals’ easily malleable list of “rights”), without the traditionalists’ demand that they pay for such things themselves, or receive them as a willing gift from another who had.

In the middle of this have been the mostly decent people of America going about their business and paying sporadic attention to the ideological conflict.

For the past 100 years, the entitlement idea has advanced. There have been rear-guard actions opposing it (fought by, e.g. William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan), but these have delayed or postponed, rather than reversed the trend.

Now, however, the idea of entitlement is, to borrow a term used by many others, literally and figuratively nearing bankruptcy. The cost of taxing, borrowing, or inflating to pay for people NOT to produce is going to be higher than Americans are willing to pay within the next 10 years.

On the side of the entitled are a motley collection of genuine scum who want to use them as a way to actively destroy civilization, the “Anointed” busybodies trying to hold on to their self-image as morally superior (or in many cases, to distract from their own fantastic wealth acquired partly or wholly through the political process), politicians (almost all of the Democrats, but many Republicans as well) who’ve managed to use “compassion” through the money of others to get themselves elected, and an army of sympathizers throughout the media, government agencies, court systems, unions, Hollywood, and subsidized universities.

On the side of the workers (the producers, not the proletariat of Marxist lore) are reality, and a relatively young (the Tea Party for lack of a better comprehensive term) movement supporting them, with good intentions, few illusions, but little or no experience in political battle. There are also the established conservative and libertarian organizations – some of which, like any organization, have some inertia in their culture, but almost all of whom recognize the need to fight.

What do we need to do now?

• First, we can’t forget that also on the “entitled” side are the victims of the welfare state themselves – the children (and even the mothers and fathers) from families whose breakup was subsidized by the welfare check. The disabled worker whose will to be productive in spite of his disability is eroded. The able-bodied young man who loses the habit of working daily after more than a year of collecting an unemployment check and pretending that he’s tried to find a job. The elderly who haven’t made provisions for their own retirement income or medical care. Most of these are people who can work and get along with each other if they have an incentive to do so.

  Keep them in your mind when you’re lectured for your supposed lack of compassion. Keep them in mind too when you’re tempted to think that it’s only a lack of moral character and not the perverse incentives in a man-made system that led to their current conditions.

• Second, fight relentlessly and NOW. There are a minority of the Entitled who are going to fight back just as fiercely at any attempt to take away what they think is Theirs. We’ve seen them in 2011 in Greece, in the Wisconsin statehouse, in public parks all over America.

  They’ve convinced themselves they can win this fight, despite the fact that the United States federal government alone has a debt greater than what all Americans produce in a year (leaving aside its less-binding promises such as Social Security and Medicare), and despite the fact that even some local and state Democrats have recognized the looming fiscal crises.

  They will continue to convince themselves of a win unless and until their funding dries up and their ideas are widely recognized as the rotten lies that they are. And they will grow temporarily much stronger if they get to keep any semblance of the current President and Congress.
  (Which category of entitlement supporters the President and various members of Congress belong to is debatable; that they’re on the side of entitlement is not.)

  This fight, like other predictably imminent conflicts throughout history, can be resolved with much less cost now if it’s decisively pursued to a conclusion than if it’s delayed or half-assed. Would there have been an American Civil War, had a compensated emancipation program been instituted in 1850? Would the conflict of 1914-18 still be the only “Great War” had Hitler been removed from power after occupying the Rhineland? It’s plausible but not certain in both cases. Would the costs in money and lives lost have been much lower had slavery and National Socialism been defeated earlier? Undoubtedly.

How can we defeat entitlement now? Fight it with everything we’ve got.

• We have a largely sympathetic population around us who understands the underlying reality. They want economic growth and job opportunities, not entitlement. We are the only ones offering that, and we should not be ashamed nor should we deviate from that path.
• We should by all means continue to encourage each other and the less ideologically committed in the House and Senate of the reality of our conviction, at every chance we get.

And by all means, do not just stand on the sidelines and cheer.

• Get involved in your local Republican Party as a precinct captain, and oppose the party leadership if they won’t fight.
• Register sympathetic voters and get them to turn them out at election time.
• Politely correct people when they state Entitlement assumptions as though they were fact.
• Ridicule Leftists when they spew nonsense, no matter how prominent they are.
• Expose the “long march” through an institution before it gets entrenched.
• Continue working to get conservative Republicans elected to office, and don’t shy away from stepping on anyone’s toes to get that done.
• DON’T get bogged down in personality conflicts with people who agree with you.

Do ALL of these. They don’t take that much time once you’ve done them once; it takes less time to succeed then to fail.

With you all to victory,

Chris Renner