At Friday night's candidates' night, hosted by the LV Tea Party, Republican senatorial candidate Pat Toomey wasted no time condemning the Obama / Reid / Pelosi troika."Their mission is to fundamentally redesign the American polity, to turn us into a European-style welfare state where a vast government controls the economy, redistributes wealth and forces the kind of social and economic outcomes that their Mandarins want to impose on the rest of us. And what's so encouraging to me is the way the American people are rising up, and saying very clearly and unambiguously, as we're saying today, 'we will have none of this.'
"I think the people of Pennsylvania and, I suspect, beyond that, they understand that the source of the greatness of our society is never government. The greatness of America is the American people."
(You can see the video here.)
Toomey was certainly "preaching to the choir,"as noted at LVPoliblog. At the only other tea party meeting I attended, the general consensus was that we are well along the path of socialism, and have been ever since Teddy Roosevelt was President.
But is this view accurate? According to Common Dreams' Nine Myths About Socialism in the US, no.
