Great reply.
I was going to reply with “Taxed Enough Already” really isn’t all that threatening. There hasn’t been any violence associated with the TEA Party, unlike radical leftists.
Like most Americans, I’m in favor of progress. My problem is that “Progressives” are never challenged to explain why the direction they want to go is indeed progress.
Nobody ever does what Socrates did and challenge them to define “the Good.” If we don’t agree on what the Good is, then how can we agree on policies that will move us toward it?
This is IMO the biggest mistake conservatives make. We implicitly accept the leftist definition of the Good.
BTW, imo most of these arguments are in the process of becoming obsolete. They are essentially arguments about how to distribute scarce stuff produced by people. An economy of scarcity.
But we are rapidly moving towards a society in which there will be a lot of stuff around, but very few people required to produce it. A economy of abundance. This is, of course, the end result of constantly increasing productivity.
Since the free market and almost all political systems are about the distribution of scarce resources, they simply become irrelevant in a world where those resources aren’t scarce.