My cup of tea today is Dong Ling with a spoonful of honey. It’s rumored to be medicinal. We’ll see if it turns the tide against the chest cold inhabiting my lungs since 2010 began. Leave out the honey and you won’t find a more bitter tea drink. It must be good medicine since it requires a spoonful of sugar, though I’ll have to wait for the outcome before I can say for sure.
Outcomes get short sheeted these days in politics. Politicians, their appointees, handlers and apprentices, devote themselves with great linguistic artistry to public products with no measurable outcomes. The art of government today is to a) get the money, to b) do the things you want, without c) creating any grounds for critical assessment of what you did.
Politicians in Congress, the Executive branch, and the Judiciary, at all levels of government from the local to the federal, skillfully parse out causes from effects. Like paints on a canvas, causes and effects are freely blended to fit social, economic, political, regulatory, judicial, and administrative theories as the need arises. This soup of ad-hoc connected parts and theories oozes out of the public bureaucracy to bind us with an endless stream of laws, orders and judgments, each layer more unfounded than its precedents.
As political men become more estranged from American reality, the passion employed by their defenders becomes more intense. Fanaticism goes up as reality fades.
In 2009, tea partying got serious. Tea partyers are a sober bunch of stakeholders in the American ideals that have guided our country to outcomes of success, peace, wealth, learning, growth, health, stability, strength, spirituality, accountability, morality and freedom. Tea partyers connect real causes to real effects. Their social, economic and political philosophies integrate to, and reflect reality. As a people connected to causation, they understand that reality has its limits. They know we live in a world of scarcity, of limited means and unlimited wants. They know that power corrupts people, and that governments are run by people.
Real causation radically departs from our modern political culture based on selling the illusion of unlimited means to the fulfillment of unlimited wants. Ironically, while attempting to satisfy all of men’s desires, modern politicians actually prevent the lasting accomplishments necessary to advance mankind’s condition and capacity. This happens because they force wealth into their unsustainable visions instead of the outcomes that free men would otherwise choose–outcomes that would actually produce something to improve the human condition.
The meaningful class divisions in America today are not between the rich and the poor, or the legal resident and the illegal alien, or between those covered by health insurance and those without health insurance (albeit who still have access to free health care.) All of those divisions are surmountable by free people acting within the bounds of the American constitutional system.
The key class division in America, not so easily overcome, is between those who create/consume (sell & buy) political illusions, and those who don’t. This boundary separates the brainwashed believers in statist myths from citizens with free minds. Multiple wars were fought in the 20th century over this division and some continue today. The statist disease is pernicious. It promises the easy buck and appeals to scammers and the get rich quick crowd.
The tea I’m drinking at the moment will not cure me because I want it to. Thousands of words of slick marketing, executive orders or tortured judicial reasoning will not change that fact. Neither will thousands of pages of incomprehensible legislation.
