An Expanded Reading List for the Tea Party
Published: October 10, 2010
To the Editor:
“Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts” (news article, Oct. 2) says the Tea Party has turned to writings like “The Law,” by Frédéric Bastiat, which was published in 1850, and “The Road to Serfdom,” by Friedrich Hayek, from 1944.
Why haven’t Tea Partiers acknowledged their debt to a less-obscure text, Herbert Hoover’s 1928 “rugged individualism” speech? It framed the choice open to the United States as the “American” system or a “European system of diametrically opposed doctrines — doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.”
The expansion of government, Hoover argued, would sacrifice freedom and liberty to the “despotism” of bureaucracy and government control. “Free speech,” he concluded, “does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die.”
Instead of citing obscure European texts, the Tea Party and its Republican supporters should acknowledge their debt to Hoover — and then try to explain why his policy prescriptions would work any better today than they did during the Great Depression.
Mark J. Stern
Philadelphia, Oct. 2, 2010
HAHAHAHA!!
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