V oices of the Tea Party is a real-time collaborative forum for Tea Partiers around the country that delivers in-depth information on tactics, strategy, and policy from on-the-ground activists through the use of inexpensive and easy to download e-books. The series will serve the vibrant online community of everyday Americans who launched and continue to drive the Tea Party movement, by taking their collaborative discussions to a much higher level. Tea Party supporters around the country will now be able to instantly access best practices that have succeeded elsewhere, hear the stories of others in the movement, and learn from Tea Partiers with specific policy ideas and expertise. Perhaps more important, they will be able to engage with other thought leaders by submitting their own e-book proposals for possible inclusion in the series. (Please see our website for details: broadsidebooks.net.) Readers and writers alike can thereby join the important national discussion within this ever-expanding community of citizen-activists who have dedicated themselves to securing the movements core values of constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets.
Series editor Michael Patrick Leahy has been one of the driving forces of the Tea Party movement from its inception. Hes a co-founder of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, which sponsored the very first national Tea Party demonstrations; the February 27, 2009, Nationwide Chicago Tea Party; and the April 15, 2009, Tax Day Tea Party. He is also the author of The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement , to be published by Broadside Books in January 2012. His website is http://www.michaelpatrickleahy.com.
I am a 100-watt incandescent light bulb and I have been sentenced to death by the federal government. I will be executed at one minute after midnight on January 1, 2012.
I serve but one purpose, and that is to cast light where there was none before. I do my job very well and very inexpensively. I do it so well, in fact, that every house and office in the United States is familiar with me or my siblings.
Last year, over one billion incandescent light bulbs like me and my siblings of the 40-watt and 60-watt variety were sold in the United States. We joined over five billion incandescent light bulbs already at work throughout the country, available to provide pleasant light anywhere, anytime, at the turn of a switch.
And yet I stand wrongly accused and unjustly condemned, sentenced to die by the hand of Big Government. How did this happen? What unseen forces put me on death row? The public needs to know the names of the villains who orchestrated this miscarriage of justice. Who conducted the kangaroo court filled with trumped up charges against me, brought by well-heeled lobbyists in $2,000 suits and Gucci shoes?
What powerful industry executives, stuck selling me at low prices and low profit margins, deceptively manipulated the government to force my execution, so they could replace me with unsafe, high-priced, high-margin, swirly spiraled Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs manufactured in China?
I accuse you, Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, as one of those industry executives who sacrificed my tungsten filament on the altar of your industrial planning.
I accuse you, Congressman Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and now the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, of moral cowardice and spinelessness. You denied me due process. You knowingly participated in my trial without allowing me the benefit of a defense attorney, the right to call my own witnesses, or the right to cross-examine witnesses brought by the prosecution against me. You carelessly co-sponsored Democrat Jane Harmans amendment that simply extended the date of my execution by two years.
Your complicity is most odious because you pretend to support free market principles, and yet you acted as the lackey of the crony capitalists. And the price of your soul was low! General Electrics PAC contributed only $2,000 to you in the year of my conviction.
I accuse you, the several energy and environmental zealots who testified for the prosecution against me, of willful misrepresentation of the scientific and health facts when comparing my performance with that of CFLs.
And I accuse you, George W. Bush, of negligence, for signing my death sentence without fully understanding or caring to discover the injustice of my conviction.
To understand the forces that have condemned me, let me first tell you some of my family history.
My grandfather was born in the Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory of inventor Thomas Alva Edison in 1879. Edison wanted to harness the power of electricity to provide convenient and efficient light for homes and businesses. Most houses in those days were lit in the evening by candle or kerosene oil lamp, which were neither safe nor particularly effective.
Remember the ill-fated Mrs. OLeary whose cow supposedly kicked over the lantern and caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871? Edison thought inexpensive electrical lighting could prevent such tragedies in the future, and along the way bring its inventor great financial rewards. To be clear, he was motivated by the prospect of financial rewards because he believed practical electrical lighting would solve a host of problems. Besides the obvious safety concerns, kerosene oil lamps and gas lanterns were smelly and required constant cleaning. And the quality of light they cast was often unsteady. As a result, human productivity was severely limited by the constraints of darkness.
Though there wasnt yet any capability to transmit and distribute electric power to households and businesses that might install these new incandescent bulbs, Edison knew that if there was money to be made in it, the free market would help him solve that problem.
Lets consider for a moment the wondrous manner by which this unschooled but driven young man came to bring together just the right combination of people, materials, and other resources to begin the mission that he was born to undertakethe relentless invention of new products that people found useful.
In the nine decades since the ratification of the Constitution, the federal government had, with a few notable exceptions, not infringed upon the right of citizens to freely exercise their individual economic liberties. In addition, federal expenditures were very limitednever exceeding 4 percent of the countrys Gross Domestic Product. There was no income tax, and, for the most part, the federal government didnt pick winners and losers. It was true, however, that the railroad subsidies initiated in the 1860s and the tariffs that favored politically connected industries signaled the beginning of federal intervention in the free markets that would infect the political world several decades later.
Edison himself learned the hard way that it was individual people and businesses exercising their economic liberties that picked the winners and losers. They did so by paying in the marketplace for goods and services they wanted. At first, Edison invented products that caught his fancy. He considered it a significant accomplishment when he secured his first patent back in 1869he was only 22 at the timefor an electric vote counting machine. But no one was interested in buying his wonderful invention.
