There are some false dichotomies in Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column denigrating what he calls the Tea Kettle movement (such as that diagnosing symptoms somehow makes it impossible to offer policies, that popularity makes a movement automatically suspect, etc.), but he does get a couple of things very right: the description of what kind of presidential and congressional leadership is needed today, the point that real decisions about spending cuts have to be made if the current public dissatisfaction with government is to have any policy relevance (although he actually denies this as a possibility), and above all, what America’s competitive advantage is: “our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.”

Of course Friedman, like today’s elites in general, tends to think that nothing happens except what’s reported in his own dreadful newspaper, so he claims that the Tea Party people were content with the Bush years of spending hikes. That is a falsehood, at the very least in the important sense that he is making an unfounded positive statement. The leadership of the right failed on that one; the public was neither consulted nor listened to.

It’s not fair to blame the people as a whole, much less one segment of the voting population, when numerous spending programs are sold to them piecemeal as each being essential to the survival of the nation, blah blah blah, and the actual details of the programs are kept secret. The public was supposedly all for the financial bailouts, for example, but once they found out the actual details and their implications, it was too late to turn them back. Same with the health care bill, in spades.

This has been the specialty of the press and political establishment in recent years: to sell big spending items to the public as costing far less than the really will, hiding the details in legislation consisting of hundreds of pages, voting the bills into law despite public outcry against them, and then falsely blaming the public (and, more egregiously, segments of the public that actually opposed those things) for going along with the disastrous spending and regulation that is killing the economy.

And yes, as it happens, there were plenty of people on the right who spoke out against the spending and the nation-building in Iraq (I was one of these, as it happens), but of course Friedman and the rest of the dying-media elites ignored our arguments as not fitting in with their script of all free-market people being captives of Wall Street and people waiting to be raptured into Heaven. We were demonized then just as is being done to the Tea Party movement today.

Most importantly, Friedman exemplifies the elites’ lack of appreciation for the need to trust in spontaneous order when planning public policy (and especially an awareness of the crucial insights of Michael Polanyi). Friedman documented this order in action in his early books, but he now consistently fails to acknowledge that the benefits of spontaneous order depend overwhelmingly on political and economic liberty. These, incidentally, are notions the nation’s Founders knew intimately and attempted to incorporate into our founding documents.

Despite its shortcomings, Friedman’s oped should serve as a clarion call to all of those who are dissatisfied with the current drift of our nation’s government, a reminder of the urgent need to articulate the principles that underlie the liberal alternative to statism.