This is what I gather about the economic and social issues that are being addressed by Tea Party platform (please correct me if I am wrong):
Lowering taxes because of wasteful 'Big Government' spending.
Do away with Social Security and Medicare.
Do away with 'Big Government' regulation of business, civil and workers rights.
States Rights.
To let people do as they wish without regulation i.e. rules.
The text below is from Wikipedia: link,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights#Northern_argumentsThe whole article of "States Rights" is an interesting read: link,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rightsThis needs to said about the article, although most of the article is well cited thus factual, there are some 'citation needed' at the end of some sentences. These 'citation needed' are there because of opinions and bias opinions of the authors of the article. Although, I do agree with these opinions for the most part, a discussion for improvements to the article can be found here.
link,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:States%27_rights<snip>
The historian James McPherson noted that Southerners were inconsistent on the states' rights issue, and that Northern states tried to protect the rights of their states against the South during the Gag Rule and fugitive slave law controversies. The historian William H. Freehling noted that the South's argument for a states' rights to secede was different from Thomas Jefferson's, in that Jefferson based such a right on the unalianable equal rights of man. The South's version of such a right was modified to be consistent with slavery, and with the South's blend of democracy and authoritarianism. Various historians and commentators, including Adams, Sinha, and Richards, among others, are of the opinion that the States' Rights argument made by supporters of the Confederacy was in fact a thinly disguised justification of continued slavery in the southern states, and/or moves by the Southern states to violate the states' rights of Northern states.
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States' rights to engage in slavery;
States' rights to suppress the freedom of speech of those opposed to slavery or its expansion, by seizing abolitionist literature from the mail;
States' rights to violate the sovereignty of the non-slave States by sending slave-catchers into their territory to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, to seize supposed runaway slaves by force of arms.
States' rights to send armed Border Ruffians into the territories of the United States such as Kansas to engage in massive vote fraud and acts of violence; see Slave Power and Bleeding Kansas;
States' rights to deem portions of their population "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect", by means of the Dred Scott decision;
States' rights to secede from the United States after an election whose result they disagreed with, the election in 1860 of Abraham Lincoln;
States' rights to seize forts and arsenals of the United States following their purported secession; see Fort Sumter;
States' rights to have a less democratic form of government; Sinha, in particular, argues this point, illustrating that the state of South Carolina, home of John Calhoun, the ideological godfather of the Slave Power, had a far less democratic order than the several other United States. Although all white male residents were allowed to vote, property restrictions for office holders were higher in South Carolina than in any other state.<3> South Carolina had the only state legislature where slave owners had the majority of seats.<3> It was the only state where the legislature elected the governor, all judges and state electors.<3> The state's chief executive was a figurehead who had no authority to veto legislative law.<3>
States' rights to overturn the ideal expressed in the Declaration of Independence — that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
Sinha and Richards conclude their cases by arguing that the Civil War had nothing to do with "states' rights", democracy, or resistance to arbitrary power. They argue that it was instead the result of the increasing cognitive dissonance in the minds of Northerners and (some) Southern non-slaveowners between the ideals that the United States was founded upon and identified itself as standing for, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, and the reality that the slave-power represented, as what they describe as an anti-democratic, counter-republican, oligarchic, despotic, authoritarian, if not totalitarian, movement for ownership of human beings as the personal chattels of the slaver. As this cognitive dissonance increased, the people of the Northern states, and the Northern states themselves, became increasingly inclined to resist the encroachments of the slave power upon their states' rights and encroachments of the slave power by and upon the Federal Government of the United States. The slave power, having failed to maintain its dominance of the Federal Government through democratic means, sought other means of maintaining its dominance of the Federal Government, by means of military aggression, by right of force and coercion, and thus, the Civil War occurred.
"Historians, like contemporaries, have long noted that an overwhelming majority of South Carolinians were for secession. But a majority of South Carolinians had nothing to do with secession or the glorification of human bondage. A majority of South Carolinians in 1860 were slaves."
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Any spelling mistakes within the snips were not corrected. It is not my article to correct...
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