AS THE 2010 mid-term elections approach, it is all but certain that those candidates closely associated with the “tea party” movement will receive support from the public so robust that they might take not one but both houses of Congress. For whatever good that this may do in streamlining how this country is run and how its money is spent, their penchant for hysterics and their likely would-be habit of making up their positions as they go along can lead them into having their fortunes reversed come 2012. And if it’s failure that is in store for them then it is only best that they should fail, not so much because I feel they deserve failure but more because they are so completely unprepared for success. Though I believe those who make up the movement to be well-intentioned, and some of their positions to be justified, I cannot trust any movement that lives by a central principle that is so completely at odds with itself.

The Tea Party movement’s primary ambition is to “take back” the country from those who would seek to rid it of what the movement believes is most valuable to it: individual liberty (personhood) and American exceptionalism (nationhood). In fact this is their only ambition, simply restated several times over with semantic adjustments where needed. Their ideal is some equation that is missing a component. By granting more freedom to us as individuals we grow closer to the nation. This ludicrous proposition is no secret among either the movement’s critics or its sympathizers; however these observers are just as bad as the movement in refraining to explain why they know this dynamic to be impossible. They themselves do not want to have to choose between personhood and nationhood. The tea party attendees are hardly sinister in believing that their ambition makes sense; the worst crime they can be accused of is misunderstanding the evolution of our nation and seeing what little sense it makes to return to the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian vision of American individualism while not wanting to weaken their nation as a superpower. Whether they are aware of that is unclear at this moment, but both cannot go together.

Whether or not the movement is one steeped in explicit nationalism depends on which kind of Tea Party attendee one asks, but it’s clear that national identity brings them together. Assuming that their success with the midterm elections goes as swimmingly as the pundits, pollsters, and candidates themselves predict, their tenure will resemble in actions what William F. Buckley conveyed in words: That for America to endure–in his case it was against World Communism–libertarian notions of civil liberties could reasonably be put on the back burner for an indefinite period. Though considered an extreme position as much now as it was then, if not more so, Buckley was simply stating what was and still is required to run America, or any nation for that matter. That there are individual liberties at all in this country is entirely alien to this basic logic, and the new crop of Republican legislators, likely led by one who is more nationalist than most, will take steps to correct this error.

In a nation there is no such thing as an “individual” or a “person,” only a “citizen.” Though the nation’s very being is linked to these citizens, they having founded and built it, they do not own it or control it; their function is limited to powering its organs and providing it with sustenance. Every action undertaken by the citizen, though often in the guise of individual determination, is done as part of their function to keep the nation alive. Whereas customs such as labor, education, marriage, and family have no beneficial bearing on the welfare of an individual, they are crucial to the health of a nation.

Likewise, political leaders are as subject to this dynamic as everybody else. Though his sense of individuality is more apparent than in others, it is only because it is so tightly cuffed to the nation. In fact a nation’s leader is a leader because he is more in tune with the non-individualistic workings of the citizens, and knows that he must to all in his power to put the citizens in the nation’s employ to the use most beneficial to the nation. As such, the leader can decree whatever he feels best for that purpose, whether it be to draft soldiers for a war (be it a war for feeding the nation or for virus protection), to take over corporations and their means of production, to prosecute and eliminate perceived internal disease, or to institute communal production programs like that of Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” and he cannot be reproached for having done so.

This is appalling to “individuals,” and no doubt there are those citizens going about their days with that delusion of themselves–they will be found of course. These would prefer to be anything other than servants, and there isn’t much option for those in leadership positions to do anything else other than order them to serve.

If the new class of legislators come into Congress with no understanding of this, it is only proper that they learn it. Those who learn will do well, while those who don’t will be told what to do. What’s to be learned is that time spent in session is not so much how to save their voters’ money, but to redirect where it is spent. The nation’s fat is easily enough found, and likely to be burnt, at NPR, NEA, NEH, the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, the President’s Council on Bioethics, etc. Their funds will be put instead into defense, industry, biological research, intelligence, Planned Parenthood, Medicare, welfare, education, etc., all of which are crucial to strengthening the nation. The life of a citizen, then, is inextricably tied to service.

This is not to say that any of this will explicitly happen, let alone between 2011 and 2013, but these are some of the things that Tea Party attendees must consider when they vote for a Sharron Angle, a Joe Wilson, a Christine O’Donnell, or a Marco Rubio. Will they adhere to the needs of the nation or will they damn it all and make the first strike for anarchy? It is my suspicion that they’re more reconciled with the nation than is generally assumed. After all, those who have reconciled in the other direction are not seen and don’t want to be seen, having resolved to take to the wilderness and incubate into a formidable virus, a fatal unity of individuals.

GIVING MORE power to the regime in Washington is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to bring America back to economic health. Here’s the proposal I’m bringing to the table at Tea Party rallies across the country this week.

1. Reducing regulations is primary, since regulation is what stifles commerce: the more regulations, the more it costs our economy. Most regulations are used by big international corporations to reduce competition, and competition would help us get out of this depression.

2. End the “war on drugs.” Make them legal (increase competition, drive out organized crime) and sold at any drug store. Allow people to decide what to take in — or not take in — to their bodies. Those who make bad decisions will eventually be weeded from the gene pool, just as they should be. We don’t need a police state and a prison on every corner to solve this problem.

3. Eliminate the intrusive and privacy-destroying income tax; have the states ratify an amendment withdrawing the 16th Amendment. We could replace it with something similar to the http://fairtax.org proposal (a federal sales tax) with the same amendment that removes the income tax and abolishes the IRS (preferably a sales tax only on new items).

This will reduce the number of “tax crimes” that good, honest people are in jail for. The tax code is tens of thousands of pages and no human being alive has even read all of it, much less knows for sure if he has “obeyed” every jot and tittle. This is why politically-motivated prosecutors can put almost anyone in jail if they want to: they can always find some violation of some obscure provision in anyone’s 1040 confession sheet. Eliminating the income tax will take away that illegitimate power.

It will also promote green living because people will save more and waste less by buying second hand. They will repair and reuse and wear things out — rather than just discard and buy new.

This new tax policy will financially assault the drug dealers and pimps and other organized criminals by forcing them to have to pay taxes when they spend their money, which will further reduce the benefit of dealing in illegal trade. Right now we are taking money from people’s pay checks before they get them and at the same time we don’t tax drug dealers or pimps or illegals or other economic criminals at all. We are penalizing working Americans. A sales tax will also encourage saving money rather than encouraging the leveraging of every dime you can get, like the income tax does.

This will encourage people in the underground economy to become part of the real economy. It will stop most of the turf killings. It will ease our immigration problems, since illegals will suddenly find themselves paying the federal taxes they were evading before by hiding behind stolen or fictitious identities. Offer illegals less welfare and charge them tax — and they won’t be so eager to come here.

4. Then cut every single expenditure of the government by 10%, and begin to draw down troops immediately from around the world. Relocate half of our hundreds of foreign military bases to our southern border to help the Border Patrol do its job.

5. We don’t need the Washington regime to run our insurance or our pension plan. Make sure workers get back every dime they paid in (how about not one cent of foreign aid until every American worker gets his money back), but grandfather Social Security and Medicare out of existence.

6. Pass an amendment to the Constitution that makes all laws and treaties have a four year sunset clause, with each law or treaty needing to be approved by a separate roll call vote every four years — or cease to exist. As I stated above, our income tax code alone is so complex that no one actually knows what the law even is. That goes double for federal laws in general.

When we have so many laws, they end up being enforced arbitrarily and selectively (in addition to stifling freedom). When laws are so numerous and complex that they can — or must — be selectively enforced or ignored, we no longer have a government of laws. We have reverted to a government of men — exactly what the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid.

7. We need to give up our role as the policeman of the world. Let other nations fight their own fights, as they have for thousands of years. The very idea of forcing “regime change” on “bad” governments is ludicrous. Ninety per cent. of governments are “bad” by our standards, and the regime in Washington isn’t so hot either, come to think of it. But other peoples have other standards. Let them work out their revolutions, if they want them, for themselves.

8. There should be no welfare to banks or other corporations. And the fractional reserve banking system — wherein we allow bankers, including but not limited to the Fed, to create our money out of thin air and then charge us interest on it — needs to be replaced by a more honest and failure-proof system.

I don’t expect the system politicians in Washington to listen. The Republicans are just as much in bed with the financial predators as are the Democrats. And Fox News and its little pet teapots like Sarah Palin are owned by predator-in-chief Rupert Murdoch, for God’s sake. That’s why we need to build the Tea Party movement into a truly independent force. No compromise. We need our freedom and our country back.