The United States Chamber of Commerce just out-Obama’d Obama. They will spend fifty million dollars on an anti-primary campaign against Tea Party upstarts in the 2014 election season. And why will they do this? Chamber point man Scott Reed told The Wall Street Journal why: “No fools on our ticket.” (See the quote here at The Hill online. You have to subscribe to the Journal to read it there.)

Someone needs to ask Scott Reed: Who is the bigger fool, and whose ticket is it, anyway?

No fools? Who are the fools?

By “fools” Scott Reed means Senators like Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). Reed and others blame those two men for shutting down the government in October. Never mind that Senator Harry W. Reid (D-Nev.), and not Senators Cruz and Lee, shut down the government. Besides: who is talking about the government shutdown today, except Scott Reed and his crew of Nervous Nellies? The Chamber and others got their wish, meaning a bad budget deal. Now everyone’ talking about Obamacare. Because Obamacare didn’t deliver the goods. Big government can never deliver the goods. If you like the United States Post Office, you are going to love socialized medicine. (And if you like the Dee-Em-Vee, you are going to love the State “exchanges” just as well. Or poorly.)

The Tea Party wants to talk about that. The Tea Party is here to tell you not just that Obamacare won’t deliver the goods, but why it won’t and can’t deliver the goods.

So why doesn’t the U.S. Chamber of Commerce want to talk about that? Why does the Chamber want to nominate appeasers who will agree to “fix Obamacare”?

“No fools on our ticket?” Well, maybe the Tea Party were fools to think that, if business is private, business will support them. The Tea Party forgot (maybe, maybe not) that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce does not want freedom. They want public-private partnerships. The insurance industry made a Faustian bargain with the Democratic Party: a captive market in return for throwing out all their actuarial tables. (The government called this last, “non-discrimination for pre-existing conditions.”) When Obamacare falls, it will drag its “public-private partners” down with it. Maybe the Chamber knows this. Maybe the Chamber is more interested in saving a few public-private partners’ hides than in real freedom.

Nathaniel Branden had them pegged. He “never saw Big Business do a G_d-d____d thing to assist Ayn Rand in any way,” in eighteen years as her friend, colleague, and “intellectual heir.”

Big Business found her ideas far too radical. Miss Rand believed in a free market. I mean, a free free market. One in which not only were you not to be encumbered by government regulation, but neither were (sic) anybody else. No special privileges, no special favors to protect you from your competitors.

Maybe some in the Tea Party were fools to expect that umbrella of Big Business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to be interested in real freedom. But the Chamber were bigger fools to expect anyone to trust them now. They have shown their hand; they are flying their true colors.

“No fools on our ticket,” you say? Then kindly stand down.

Whose ticket is it, anyway?

Christopher Gadsden’s “Don’t Tread On Me” flag, the unofficial symbol of the Tea Party movement. Photo: User VIkrum/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported License

The second part of “No fools on our ticket” rankles worse than the first. “Our” ticket? Whom do “we, our, ours, us” refer to? One could forgive the Tea Party for thinking “we, our, ours, us” included them. To men like Scott Reed, those words to not. To them, the Tea Party is “you, your, yours,” or maybe “they, their, theirs, them.”

And as Newsmax.com reported yesterday, the Tea Party now know this. So also do some experts. “Insane,” said Cleta Mitchell, a “power” election lawyer in Washington, D.C.

When they say, “no fools on the ticket,” [they don’t want to talk about the] centrist candidates who were the establishment favorites who lost in 2012.

Exactly. And at the top of that ticket: Mitt Romney. Why should the Chamber of Commerce want more of the same?

The senior fellow for Freedom Works, Tom Borelli, bluntly said what the Chamber really wants: more regulation to protect larger businesses. That’s not capitalism. That’s mercantilism. That policy gave us the British East India Company, and the Tea Act. Which provoked the first Boston Tea Party, 240 years ago this month.

But even Borelli misses the point. Chris Chocola at Club for Growth comes closer:

They don’t really care about what the candidates believe. They just care what party label they have — and in this case, it’s Republican.

Or maybe the Chamber does care what a candidate believes. The Republican Party belongs to them, they insist. “Their” Republican Party stands for modern mercantilism. And they mean to keep it that way.

“No fools on our ticket?” Sorry, Mr. Reed. Your ticket is all the bought-and-paid-for Members of Congress, who use the private airline you have put together from your members’ corporate jets to fly them around, and take all your other favors. They, not we, live in the fools’ paradise.

“No fools on our ticket”? True, but not the way you mean. Make that no fools on our ticket. We, those who stand for freedom, not favoritism.

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