Rick Santelli On Meet The Press 25 July 2010

Thanks to an off the cuff remark by Joe Kernen on CNBC the other morning, I belatedly learned of Rick Santelli's appearance on the network's Meet The Press program this past Sunday.

It wasn't hard to find a video of the segment on YouTube.



I found Santelli to be particularly spot on about what seems to motivate Tea Party activists. I'm one, and I've met others at rallies on Capitol Hill.

He's right that the motivating forces to control spending and reduce taxes cut across otherwise-diverse groups of people.

For real insight into the inability of mainstream liberals to understand Tea Party concerns, listen carefully (again?) to the black guest espousing more social spending, rather than spending on military matters, then Santelli's response, and, lastly, the host's clueless rejoinder.

When Santelli notes that the interest rate on Greek debt doubled in a year, the host replies,

"We're not Greece. We can print money."

My God! That man's an imbecile!

Of course "we can print money." So could, and did, the Wiemar Republic. And we all know what the led to. Wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread.

Doesn't that Meet The Press host know that money is a medium of exchange of value? It doesn't just come off of a printing press without a consequence.

Thus, the stupid notion that we can just "print more money," or, equally dangerous, as Santelli noted, borrow it, completely overlooks the fact that we have to create value in order to make the money worth something.

Finally, I realized something in Santelli's comments that had totally escaped me before I viewed this clip. For background, here's the full CNBC Santelli Tea Party call from last summer.



The host asked him a question about the Tea Party, as if it were an actual political party. Since Santelli's original reference to holding Tea Parties last year, many evidently believed that "Party" in "Tea Party" stands for, well, a political party.

If you listened closely to the second clip in the video, presenting Santelli's original call, on CNBC, for a Tea Party to be held in Chicago, you will note that he refers to the event, a tea party, along the lines of the original one in colonial Boston. Not the birth of a political party.

I've been to a couple of events in Washington, D.C., organized as Tea Party rallies, but never have I felt I was part of a political party of any organized sort.

Until Santelli replied to this question, I didn't really understand how or why others believed that people attending Tea Party events saw themselves as members of a political party.

Good job, Rick.