In searching the Web one pervasive Tea Party Theme is the urgent need for "limited government". With Glenn Beck happily hosting one Tea Party after another, Washington D.C. has become Public Enemy Number One.        

      In response, recall that, in Peace With Honor, A.A. Milne wrote that a patriot is someone who thinks that someone else is not a patriot. It's a viable definition but the larger problem is that the Tea Party activists ignore history as they thoroughly weaken the democracy they seek to nourish.

   Consider the 1925 request, by prominent American capitalists, for Federal regulation of the aviation industry. After WWI the national government owned some 14,000 airplanes and 12,00 high powered Liberty engines, none of which got to the Western front.  In 1918, supply exceeded any conceivable demand so, while William Boeing switched from manufacturing planes to furniture, the Federal government used its expansive inventory to create and fund the Army Air Mail. Pilots like Charles Lindberg received Federal paychecks as Washington officials, traveling by train, tried to cajole and "bribe" cities to create airports. The Federal government even used $500,000 of the people's money - a considerable sum in postwar America- to create emergency landing fields from one end of the nation to the other. In addition, Washington also supported the manufacture and installation of the night lighting required for safe landings.

    While Air Mail helped get rid of the nation's surplus inventory, the Army could never use 14,000 planes. So, the government sold them to anyone with the wherewithal to buy them. None of these alleged pilots were licensed, they bypassed state sovereignty by flying wherever they wished, and they piloted planes that boasted a number of structural deficiencies. One result -from say 1920 to1925- was a series of frightening air crashes.

·         On January15, 1922, a pilot used New Jersey's ice-covered Shrewsbury River as a landing field.

Tragically the pilot forgot about the skaters. He killed a woman, maimed a man, "and knocked down a score of other spectators".

·         On April 29, 1923, a Grand Rapids, Michigan "pedestrian walked into the propeller of a plane being warmed up in a city alley".

·         On June 23, 1923, the controls "of a government surplus plane did not respond. Pilot, to miss crowd, landed in the wind and crashed.

     Newspapers trumpeted the accidents that made one fact quite obvious: The only thing that reigned in America's skies was anarchy. The fledgling plane and engine industry saw no profits on the horizon because potential customers weren't afraid to fly; they were so petrified that the earliest flight attendants were nurses! Meanwhile, General Billy Mitchell fulminated against the Federal government's lack of support for military aviation. Success in the next war demanded a fleet of the best planes but Washington thoughtlessly supported the huge Navy ships that Mitchell's pilots would easily blast to kingdom come.

   One result of these controversies was a trip to the White House. Angry capitalists demanded Federal regulation of the industry with such force that, in 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act. "This landmark legislation charged the Secretary of Commerce with fostering air commerce, issuing and enforcing air traffic rules, licensing pilots, certifying aircraft, establishing airways, and operating and maintaining aids to air navigation."

       Imagine that! Pilots needed to know how to fly.

     And capitalists charged  and lobbied Washington because the fight for Federal regulation of aviation spotlights a reality the Tea Party Patriots choose to utterly ignore. When the issue is interstate control of  factors like air commerce and safety, simple common sense  requires  that substantial power be channeled to Washington, D.C. Who else has sovereignty across the fifty states?

    Moreover, if we accept General Mitchell's 1920's call for  drastically increased aviation expenditures, can we buy planes that only protect California or Florida? Or, isn't it necessary to channel both strategy and spending into the hands of soldiers who agree to defend all Americans, all of the time?

  It would be nice if the Tea Party Patriots recognized that the "defense and security"  is the Federal government's largest budget item, that the Pentagon is the largest Federal bureaucracy, and that the soldiers patriots rightfully  applaud often act in a manner that is anything but transparent. In the name of national security, the Tea Party activists funnel more power to the halls of Washington and the Pentagon than the most fervent socialist.

    Remember, too, that aviation anarchy highlights a problem that was interstate. Today it's international issues that dominate our attention. Think of the demand  for Federal control of airport security after the hideous 9/11 bombing. Think of the new department of Homeland Security. And ask if we can ever manage to avoid economic catastrophe without regulating the banks and hedge funds who operate in sixty or a hundred nations, moving money as freely and as "safely" as the well regulated planes who now take us from one destination to another?

   Much more than a necessary evil, the Federal government is absolutely  necessary whenever we seek to resolve problems and issues that cut across the states and the world. Tragically, what's happening in 2010 is that talking swelled heads like Glenn Beck effectively use television and the Web to highlight examples of government corruption or ineptitude, forgetting in the process that they are missing the forest for the trees.

     As with aviation in 1925, the world has changed. The Tea Party Patriots champion limited government in an age when one problem after another can only be tackled -much less resolved- by government agencies with substantial interstate and international power.

      By all means eliminate the Federal government's waste, corruption and ineptitude. The recent fiasco with the "underwear bomber" comes instantly to mind.

      But, to neglect the need for substantial power in the hands of the Federal government is to make American democracy crash land as tragically as those skaters on the Shrewsbury River in 1922. From airport security to banking regulation, from nuclear weapons to the National Guard, from Medicare to Medicaid, from the Pure Food and Drug Act to the Federal Deposit Insurance Administration, from conservation via the National Parks to Washington's funding of the interstate highway system, the Federal government is often the court of first and last resort. Forget that fact and, like the Tea Party Patriots, you deserve to be tossed into the steel garbage dumpsters of history.