Or not. We don't care anymore.
Not that there was any doubt, but I think the Tea Party Nation people are quite possibly
super geniuses:
Tea Party Nation sent to their members today a message from activist Melissa Brookstone urging businesspeople to “not hire a single person” to protest the Obama administration’s supposed “war against business and my country.” Brookstone writes that business owners should stop hiring new employees in order to stand up to “this new dictator,” the “global Progressive socialist movement,” Hollywood, the media and Occupy Wall Street.
From the message, which is very calm and well thought out and not at all the deranged accusations of a unbalanced mind:
Resolved that: President Obama has seized what amount to dictatorial powers to bypass our Congress, and that because the Congress is controlled by a Progressive socialist Senate that will not impeach one of their kind, they have allowed this and yielded what are rightfully congressional powers to this new dictator. [...]
Resolved that: The current administration and Democrat majority in the Senate, in conjunction with Progressive socialists from all around the country, especially those from Hollywood and the left leaning news media (Indeed, most of the news media.) have worked in unison to advance an anti-business, an anti-free market, and an anti-capitalist (anti-individual rights and property ownership) agenda. [...]
I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.
Yes, because the socialists are coming to get you all. Socialists everywhere, redistributing your wealth, asking you to pay 1990s-era tax rates, making goddamn movies about sharing and filing reports about poor people and so on. Socialists are hiding in your closet right now, my friends, and are redistributing your socks.
This is actually an ingenious plan. We've got economy-wrecking levels of unemployment, weak demand, little access to credit and very little reason for businesses to hire anyone anytime soon. So what should you do? Start a movement demanding businesses hire nobody, and then when nobody hires people, you claim that now it's because they support your extra-special movement against the Progressive Socialist Obama Dictatorship. All those businesses would be hiring, you say, but they're just holding off out of petty ideological spite. (To be fair, this approach is far from new: The roll out of the latest Republican "jobs plan" was predicated on this exact notion, that businesses have refused to hire anyone because they're holding out for reducing regulations and tax cuts. Tea Party Nation is slow on the draw, here.)
Really, how could you top such an ingenious plan as that? I suppose you could claim that buying food is a statement of support for the tea party, and so not starving to death demonstrates your commitment to right-wing ideals (added bonus: all the people who can't afford food get branded as leftist traitors, which they pretty much are considered already.) Raindrops? Hell no: freedom drops. Every time it rains it means God is demonstrating his support for trickle-down economics.
Should we be surprised by how often conservatives have been proposing economy-wrecking "ideas" in order to make purely political points? I suppose not. If congressional Republicans were willing to shut down the entire government rather than spend a penny more toward the national debt that they freaking helped create, and if John McCain and Rand Paul and other senators can stand up and say that businessmen personally told them they're going to keep screwing America unless we hand over everything they want and then some, then a proposal for every good conservative to go out and make their local economy just a little bit worse seems like not much of an escalation.
Claiming businesses that aren't hiring and weren't planning to hire are now doing it as an expression of solidarity with your increasingly marginalized conservative group: not quite commanding the tide not to come in, but fairly close.