I found out this morning that Bill Simmon and Steve Benen talked about my tea party post on their Poli-Sci-Fi Radio show Sunday, so I will be responding to what they had to say, as well, though I will not get to everything that warrants rebuttal.

You can listen to the episode online, here.  Tea Party talk starts about half-way through.

The first thing I want to address is the common Where were these people the last 8 years? response to the Tea Parties, popular among the left.

Answer: Complaining about Bush and the Republicans in Congress spending too much money.

I was, when I covered national politics.  So were other conservatives.  Here is a post from March 2006 – just one month after I started this blog on Blogspot – in which I reference a Cal Thomas column entitled, “Spending Obsenities.”  (Link is to my post.)

Mr. Guy, in the comments of my previous Tea Party post, claimed that Freedom Works, a sponsor of the tea parties, was not active in opposing spending before now.  I don’t know how long he has been a Freedom Works member, but a quick search of my e-mail shows a Freedom Works newsletter from January of 2006, opposing government-funded, universal pre-K and supporting consumer-driven health care, as an alternative to government-funded plans.

Libertarian groups, such as CATO, have been criticizing government spending and corporate welfare all along.

What you have to understand is that the people attending these tea parties, by and large, are not Republican Party defenders.  They are citizens who support smaller government, less spending, lower taxes, and more freedom – Libertarians (both big and small “L”), Ron Paul and Bob Barr supporters, Constitution Party members, and GOP voters who are disillusioned with the party’s power-drunk spending spree over the past decade.

Another claim is that the tea parties would not have happened if McCain were elected.

Wrong again.

Conservatives did not like McCain’s penchant for spending, either.  Conservatives also opposed the bailouts under Pres. Bush last fall.  I had a post (actually quite a few) in the fall of 2006 discussing the GOP and its lack of conservatism.

We are sick of the big-government, big-spending, and disregard for the 10th Amendment.  There is no longer a place for lovers of small government and people are looking for a way to speak out.  This was a long time coming and it would have happened no matter who was elected last November.

On the Poli-Sci-Fi radio episode I linked to, Steve Benen brought up the fact that Bush and Cheney had bad approval ratings – no one was saying, “At least they are not expanding government” – as if some sort of evidence that people do not want smaller government (or less government expansion).

That might have been a good point, if only Bush had not expanded the government’s size and power.  In fact, he did.  Being a political blogger for 6 years, one would think Steve would have known that.

Benen did raise one good point, though, that the tea partiers did not do a good job articulating their message to the rest of the country.  That was unfortunately true.  There is a good message to be had in all of this, but without a spokesperson or official group that can put together a platform, people are left to their own interpretation or that of the media, which in the case of the Tax Day Tea Parties, was largely wrong.

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It’s worth noting that there were a couple of things said on that PSFR episode that I still need to address, but they necessitate their own post(s).

And they don’t intend to let the AIG crisis pass without using it to justify expanding the powers of the federal government.

“Our system failed in fundamental ways.  To address this will require comprehensive reform. Not modest repairs at the margin, but new rules of the game.”

So said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner before the House Financial Services Committee.

“The days of light-touch regulation are over,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Frank said the financial and economic catastrophes of the last 18 months had created a new political consensus in favor of tighter financial supervision. Mr. Frank said he hoped to pass a bill “very soon” to give the federal government “resolution authority” to seize control, restructure and shut down troubled financial institutions.

The public has been worked up into a frenzied outrage over the AIG retention bonuses, resulting in protests and death threats, and is waiting for the government to remedy the injustice.

What a perfect opportunity to expand government’s power.

Even President Obama has expressed outrage over the AIG bonuses.

As it turns out, it was the Obama administration itself that requested language in an amendment that would allow for these bonuses to be paid after the company received a government bailout.

But we don’t know who knew what, and Treasury Secretary Geithner has already been caught lying about the matter to Congress.

Then we find out that some of the people getting these bonuses – people who were not involved with the credit default swaps that caused the crisis at AIG – have been putting in 14 hour days for no pay, despite other offers from more stable companies, with the understanding that these bonuses would come.

Don’t expect the mob to care.  It’s time to hate the rich.  They deserve whatever happens to them.  They are greedy and responsible for all of your problems.

We’re in the middle of a crisis!

And you can be sure that your government will not waste it.

Can you imagine the music to my ears those words are coming from one of my dear children?

Actually, he meant capitalization. The 4YO needed to capitalize the word he was writing.

Still, music to my ears.

I just want to take a moment here to say, this is why we don’t eat beef.

I am sure that there are more relevant, and even more recent, posts for that comment, such as The Free-Market and Product Safety, posted last week, so I thought it would make more sense to address this in a new post, rather than on the non-related post on which the comment was made.

The claim is that the conditions of the slaughtering plant were due to the “small government” policies of President Bush.

(It pains me to use “small government” and “President Bush” in the same sentence.)

It is long held belief of the left that the only reason government programs fail is because the Republicans come along and under-fund them, under-staff them, and set them up for failure.

Could it be, though, that massive federal programs are just unsustainable?

I think this incident is a perfect example of how much more effective non-government entities are at insuring product safety than government agencies are. Their missions are more focused, they are typically more passionate about that focus, and they have more at stake if they fail to meet their objectives.

I mentioned that we do not eat beef. Actually, we usually don’t eat beef. Occasionally, maybe twice a year, we spend the extra money to buy a cut of beef from cows that were fed organic grain and not treated with antibiotics, from a small, preferably local, farm.

I do not rely on a massive government agency to inspect the beef I feed my family. This fact would not change no matter how well-funded and well-staffed that agency was.

I rely on the reputation and quality of the farm that produces it.

But not everyone is going to behave like I do, and I am certainly not immune to a contaminated food supply, so obviously I need to come up with some alternatives to the current system.

So, what do I think the government should do?

First and foremost, the government should punish people who use practices that lead to unsafe food.

What good does it do to have food safety guidelines when there is no real consequence for violating them.

I am talking about serious punishments, like jail or a financially ruinous fine.

Second, inspection should be done at a local level. It is a lot easier to hold someone accountable absent a large bureaucratic structure.

Third, inspection should be done at the expense of the business. If they want to sell their products with the government’s seal of approval, they should pay for it.

Which leads me to my final point, food producers should also have the option of using a private organization for inspection and sporting their seal of approval in lieu of the government’s.

This would provide choice for the producers and for the consumers.

Let me ask you this, would you rather buy meat with the USDA seal of approval or one from People for the Humane Treatment of Cows?

I am not a policy maker, so feel free to pick this apart.

I just came up with this off the cuff (with three children playing behind me) based on the following principles:

(1) Government should punish people who cause harm or violate the rights of others.

(2) Government should not punish or otherwise infringe on the rights of people who have not committed a crime.

(3) Government should remain as small and as close to the people as possible.

(4) Government should not impede the freedom of consumers to have choices in the marketplace.

The argument goes something like this: We need the government to regulate and inspect products for our safety. If the government did not perform this function, the greedy businesses, which only care about money, would not make safe products and we would all die in the streets.

Or some other doomsday scenario.

There are at least three things wrong with this argument.

The first, and most obvious, is that it does not make for a good business model to kill or injure your customer base.

It just makes no sense that businesses would not care about product safety.

One of the signature qualities of a business is that in order to exist, it must continue to provide goods and/or services to customers, who, by definition of a free-market system, have a choice to do business elsewhere.

In this day and age especially, with our rapid forms of communication, it would be virtually impossible for a company that did produce faulty products to stay in business.

Sure, in theory, a company could let safety and quality slide, but what company would want to take such a chance on their reputation?

Another thing wrong with this argument is that it assumes the government’s role is to preemptively combat possible crimes, even when there is no evidence of guilt.

How painfully ironic that the same people who oppose a preemptive military strategy are often the same people who support a preemptive domestic strategy of government oversight, just in case someone might do something wrong.

The government’s role is to protect us from actual harm. To catch the bad guys, if you will.

It is not the government’s role to assume everyone is a bad guy and leave it up to them to prove that they are not.

Yet that is the operating assumption when the government over-regulates anything. (This does not just apply to the regulation of businesses.)

Why don’t we just have a code of laws that makes it a punishable crime when a company negligently produces faulty products, instead of a civil matter?

As it stands, government regulation is a tool that is used by large corporations to stifle competition from smaller businesses. Only those with money can afford to comply. A company needs its own legal department to even understand all of the complex regulatory codes, and sometimes it even needs to supply accommodations for government inspectors, at additional cost.

We might very well be reducing quality – the quality that comes from competition – with the very regulations that are meant to insure it.

And perhaps the best counter-argument comes from the private standard-bearers of product safety that already exist.

Underwriters Laboratories, Arts & Creative Materials Institute, Consumer Reports, and even the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval all provide us with non-government means of ensuring that the products we purchase are safe and of good quality.

There are also trade associations, unions and guilds. Magazines. Word of mouth. Even online review sites.

I would never buy anything electronic without reading the online reviews first.

The market works for us – the consumers. We are the ones that businesses hope to win over. They need us as much as we need them, and it is not in their best interest to produce bad products.

In this era of online mass communication, the private sector can even better keep tabs on quality than at any time in our history. And it can respond to new information much more quickly than a government agency.

Private quality and safety firms have an incentive to remain diligent with their standards, for if they fail they will surely be discredited and go out of business. The same cannot be said of a government agency.

As consumers, we would benefit from an environment in which small businesses can compete without needing the money to invest time and man-power in understanding and complying with unnecessary regulation.

And as citizens, we would benefit from the freedom of a government with laws that assume innocence until guilt is proven.

Hat tip: Jeremy Ryan.