Founded in 1991, the Republican Liberty Caucus works to advance the principles of limited government, free markets and individual liberty within the Republican Party.

The members of the Republican Liberty Caucus can do a major service by providing advice to the local Tea Parties.   In the early 1990s the GOP could still claim to be the party of ideas. Today, the pathetic remnants of those ideas are seen in the discredited neo-conservative movement and a handful of failed veterans like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Pailin.

The Tea Parties lack national leadership and need to focus on local candidates and issues.  But there is a danger that corrupt national leadership will co-opt them, filling the leadership vacuum at the top.  Part of the problem is a serious lack of competence among the Tea Party members, and part of the problem is the absence of a reservoir of successful potential GOP leaders at the local level.  RLC members can provide support in building a freedom-oriented leadership cadre and in educating the Tea Party.

Fox News has seen an opportunity and aims to fill the leadership vacuum.  Of course, the announcers on Fox are almost as limited intellectually as the Tea Party rank-and-file, and this is not a case of the blind leading the blind because the Fox network is very much part of the corporatist system whose interests would be threatened by a legitimate pro-liberty movement.

RLC members who are veterans of the libertarian movement or of past conservative battles can be of immense assistance to their local Tea Parties. For example, bridges and highways might be built from the local Tea Parties to the Foundation for Economic Education.  As I note on my personal blog, that fine institution has quietly served as a fulcrum on which the freedom movement has rested since the 1940s. Yet how many in the Tea Parties are aware of the FEE?

The members of the Tea Party are moral and see that there is a national problem but are not intellectually prepared to evaluate the opinions of the Fox announcers or to develop their own solutions.  They are inexperienced and need to educate themselves, for the public schools have not provided an education as to the values that built America. Fox is a source linked to the corporatist system and finds ways to sabotage the freedom movement at critical junctures.

The members of the RLC ought to be involved with their Tea Parties and play a role in guiding  the members and helping them to begin to educate themselves.