Willard Skousen, o Pensador do Tea Party?

Talvez esteja exagerando ao considerar o conservador Americano W. Cleon Skousen um dos principais pensadores do Tea Party. Mas ele é importante, sem dúvida. Vejam uma resenha de Herb Gintis sobre um dos seus livros The Five Thousand Year Leap: Twenty-Eight Great Ideas That Are Changing the World. Gintis é um economista de esquerda, mas é Americano e portanto é intelectualmente honesto, não sendo um imbecil como todos os esquerdistas latrino americanos que beberam da fonte francesa da picaretagem acadêmica. Ele reconhece que começou a ler o livro com preconceito, achava que não ia gostar. Mas gostou! Gintis desenvolve o seguinte ponto extremamente importante:
In some places, Skousen's political conservatism does shine through, but rarely in an unenlightening way. For instance, (7) The Proper Role of Government is to Protect Equal Right, Not Provide Equal Things. The problem with this is that Skousen leaves out a third option: a "proper role" of government might be to mitigate unequal outcomes when they are not the fault of the afflicted. For instance, one might argue that it is the proper role of government to provide equal educational and health care resources to children and the elderly. Also (15) The Highest Level of Prosperity Occurs when there is a Free-market Economy and a Minimum of Government Regulation. I believe this a severe overstatement of the correct balance between market and state. The correct statement is that the market is especially powerful in producing and distributing goods and services in a flexible decentralized manner, but it produces a host of externalities. Many of these externalities are good and useful, but some are highly destructive and in need of regulation by the state. It is for this reason that there never has been a prosperous market economy without a strongly interventionist state. I am confident that there never will be. However, the state is run by politicians and bureaucrats whose capacity to intervene wisely on behalf of the public good is quite limited. Therefore, we will never have a perfectly regulated economy and any attempt to achieve this end will doubtless cripple private initiative and lead to a bloated public sector. We simply must learn to live with the evils whose alternatives are yet more evil.