Hostility against Every Tyranny over the Mind of Man

Regarding the Party Like and Obamaton video, the argument has been advanced that its heart is in the right place but not its ‘head’. That is, (I restate the argument): the intellectual underpinnings of free market conservatism are deficient, even though the principal of liberty that it enthusiastically espouses has universal truth and appeals to the human spirit. That argument is also made with regard to the Tea Party.

This seems to me a reversal of the ‘mean spirited conservative' claim but oh well, it certainly deserves to be address. Unfortunately, It has been addressed but to no avail. The corpus of classical liberalism with its ‘heart’ roots in the human spirit yearning to be free, and its ‘head’ roots in the writings of the Age of Enlightenment, which hearkened back to the democratic principles of ancient Greece, the egalitarianism of the Gospel, and the humanism best articulated by Erasmus of Rotterdam, first gave it voice. Its salient political principal may be that 'no man is above the law.' That is, that those in power cannot bend the law to their will, but must abide by it themselves: they rule at the pleasure of the governed. The economic voice of this 'liberalism' reached its heights in the theories and restatements of the ‘Last Knight of Freedom,’ Ludwig von Mises. Professor Mises, Austrian by birth, immigrated (escaped) to the US in the 1930’s. He is the intellectual guiding light of the Libertarian Party, conservative free market thought, and of this blog. His great work, Human Action, summarizes and systematizes most of the ideas of the 'Austrian School' of economics. Professor von Mises wrote many other books on specific political and economic topics, (such as Socialism and Bureaucracy, which have been quoted in this blog). The von Mises Institute has free on-line versions of most of his works along with daily essays.

I could go on at length, but the point is that the free market and the primacy of law are two of Western Civilizations treasured principals. These are what the Tea Party believes in and what they believe are in danger of being lost. Agree with them or not, it seems that these principals are the intellectual match of any tradition in learning. Those who dismiss them out of hand surly have not delved deep enough to realize the majesty of that which they are addressing. Whether they know it of not, it is the classical liberal tradition that the Tea Party espouses. Tyranny, of course, is an older tradition. It is Statist Progresivism, the modern progeny of that tradition, that the present darkness embraces.