As St. Paul trenchantly put it, “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.” And this was a saint talking, and he was using present tense. A saint whose deeds were imperfect even as he spoke, he typified us all. We are all mixed bags. The regulator, however, cannot make a mixed choice. The regulator must assign the label of good or bad character to each applicant.
One has to ask what kind of country the Tea Partiers desire, though. Clearly it is a big step away from a commonwealth. In Tea Party Utopia, it seems, the Partiers would get maximize their personal wealth, at whatever cost to the well-being of their fellow-citizens, even, or perhaps especially the poorest. It’s a country where there would be no planning or direction of economic activity from Washington, apparently in the faith that an atomized economy could avoid obliteration by the better-organized economies of other nations. And a faith as well, in the teeth of historical evidence, that privately-funded economic forces undirected by government, would give us an adequate infrastructure. And in Tea Party Utopia, cultural elites would be denied the support and recognition that even the tiny sliver of the national budget dedicated to edifying them conveys.