Ask LJ: Why does the Tea Party support Walker?

[asterroc]

Apparently the Tea Party supports Governor Walker's union busting. I don't get this at all. I thought the Tea Party was a conservative libertarian group. Shouldn't they resent the government interfering with and attempting to regulate how workers interact with employers? Or is their fiscal conservatism trumping their libertarianism?

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Reagan, who is apparently the patron saint of the Tea Party, was certainly no lover of unions.

(I don't think the Tea Party has an ideology, leaving them as a bunch of emotions with nothing to guide them.)

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I would guess that their libertarianism is winning out here.

After all, an employer ought to be able to make whatever demands the employer wants. If people don't like those demands, they can find work elsewhere. (We'll just ignore that most of the unionized employees are working for the government, and not the libertarians' sacred private corporations.)

[q10.livejournal.com]

i basically agree with you that they're being hypocritical, but, to be fair, unions as we know them today aren't just exercises of libertarian free association - they're entities that have a lot of special institutional rights and privileges that are supported by legislation.