“Populism” is back, like it or not. The largely right-wing tea party has redefined grass roots politics, at least according to the pundits. However, despite its noble rhetoric, the tea party boils down to an errant conflation of private and public liberties, an incorrect interpretation of legal jargon and an illogical conception of private business as a special entity under the law.

For those of you who don’t know, the tea party began as a quasi-grass roots, anti-government political response to some of President Barack Obama’s more controversial policies. After passage of the Federal Reinvestment and Recovery Act, Rick Santelli — a contributor for CNBC’s Business News — gave a protracted speech on the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange claiming things such as, “Cuba used to have mansions … they moved from the individual to the collective. Now they’re driving ’54 Chevys…”

Santelli continued on, mentioning that he was going to hold a Chicago tea party on the shores of Lake Michigan, and thus the name was born.

Tea party ideologies are formed around the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, wishing to emulate the “original” designs of the founders. According to the Tea Party Patriots’ Web site, the group’s core values include fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets. Its first impetus, fiscal responsibility, arises from a desire to protect citizens from high levels of taxation, “that unjustly restrict the liberty our Constitution was designed to protect.” The second impetus, constitutionally limited government, is primarily a drive for limited federal power. “Like the founders,” the Web site reads, “we support states’ rights for those powers not expressly stated in the Constitution.” Finally, the idea of free markets boils down to the opposition of “government intervention into the operations of private business,” claiming that “our current government’s interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty.”So what’s the problem? To begin with, the Tea Party Patriots’ rationale for fiscal responsibility is, at its heart, a mistaken conflation of personal and economic liberty.

The Constitution, being a document of political law influenced by the Greek classics that dominated the Enlightenment — which produced our founders’ intellect — saw both freedom and liberty as characteristics of a citizen’s public life. That public life includes voting, running for public office and engaging in the forum that links human beings to one another: politics.

This consideration of liberty, as well-known historian and Boston University professor Howard Zinn noted in “A People’s History of the United States,” did not include economic freedom, as one could infer from the founders’ exclusion of measures to bring the poor, disenfranchised slave and Native American populations into the fold. One could even argue, with the exclusion of women, Indians and African slaves, that they barely possessed a concern for public freedom in a universal sense.

Constitutionally limited government seems more logical, but falls flat when one considers jurisprudence on the matter. Article I, Section 18 of the Constitution reads, “The Congress shall have Power To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” This “Necessary and Proper” clause, which provides implicit powers to the federal government, received judicial acknowledgment as far back as 1819. In McCulloch vs. Maryland, the Supreme Court ruled that, “The States have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burthen or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress to carry into effect the powers vested in the national Government.” The implication is that the federal government possesses implied powers that are not expressly provided in the Constitution.

Without these implied powers, the government lacks the ability to adapt to situations that the founders could not have conceived. For example, the formation of the Federal Aviation Agency could not have occurred without the implied powers, because the discovery of flight occurred 114 years after the Constitution was ratified.

At risk of sounding like a broken record, the third pillar of tea party diatribe again boils down to a conflation of public and private liberties, but also includes an illogical exception of business in the realm of public law.

The line, “distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty,” bears itself out as a nonsense complaint.

Whether by Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce or the power to levy taxes, economic manipulation of any kind in no way prohibits citizens from their public liberties.

Not since owning property was a requirement for suffrage has our country’s public liberty been explicitly infringed upon by economic means — though one could argue that the increased disparity between rich and poor partitions perceived political power into the hopeless and the vociferous.

As for the concept of “government intervention into … private business,” Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce explicitly provided in the Constitution — that the tea party so vehemently clings to — immediately exposes the illogical exemption of private business from the law.

Furthermore, in the right circumstances, government intervention in economic affairs is an effective method of re-stabilizing a market. John Maynard Keynes, in his “General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” illuminated the concept that, in dire economic straits, the government’s responsibility is to maintain full employment through extra spending. While his theory has been debated by the likes of Milton Friedman, Levy Economics Institute Senior Scholar and American economist James K. Galbraith recently reflected a growing resurgence in Keynesian economics in his piece “The Collapse of Monetarism and the Irrelevance of the New Monetary Consensus.” Under the right circumstances, government intervention is not exactly crazy. So what happens if you consider the tea party movement with its rhetorical vestments stripped away?

A February article in the New York Times provides a telling account. Comprised of members from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project and the John Birch Society, the movement also finds loyalty from upstart militia movements like Oathkeepers, a group of military men and women and police personnel who vow to violently rise up against the government if they feel that the laws of the Constitution are violated.

Dig a little deeper and the party includes among its members militia organizers, leaders of the American group “Aryan Nations” and those who doubt that Obama is actually an American citizen.

Friends of Liberty, a tea party militia group, featured keynote speaker Richard Mack, a known white supremacist, at one of their meetings.

Beyond that, the organization is rife with conspiracy theorists. Affiliated Web sites like WorldNetDaily.com report such “exclusives,” as the Times put it, as stories about the armed forces seeking “Internment/Resettlement” specialists.

 Another tea party site includes a story that Obama is converting Interpol into his personal police, urging the site’s followers to take up arms. Ayn Rand — the author who brought us the pro-rich incarnation of 1984, “Atlas Shrugged” — is a regular read at tea party book clubs.

The language of the party may reflect a noble defense of liberty, but its actions and roots articulate a far more sinister and detached organization.

Even its proclaimed goals fail under reasoned scrutiny. Ultimately history will decide if the tea party is a movement with staying power or a fringe group with little to contribute to the American conversation.

One thing is for certain, though. If it is to make a dent in the machine it so detests, the tea party will need to moderate its message and learn to listen. It is only through conversation — a two-way conversation — that actual change can occur.

Skepticism of government is necessary, but paranoia and random acts of violence solve nothing. Somehow, I feel, the founders understood this.

Ian Barker is a senior in chemical engineering from Des Moines.