If you examine the positions of the Tea Party more closely, and especially that of their wealthy sponsors, I think you will find that they are not opposed to *all* government spending. They are ideologically opposed to social programs that they perceive as mostly benefiting the disadvantaged. However, they are completely fine with the monstrously bloated defence budget and with corporate subsidies. Their rhetoric may be small government and fiscal conservatism, but that's really just a smokescreen for their real agenda, which is to cut spending to other constituencies while preserving spending on their own.

It is my sense that each of you, Samuel, Emma and John is correct. Increasing control is an understandable objective. As are plans to shift costs,taxes and other burdens, to other constituencies, and still there also seem to be imponderable contradictions implicit in any notion of ultimate agenda. 
Who wants more control, more power to shape and secure their future? Everyone, of course, including the most powerful.
 Practically by definition, the most powerful are most able to do what they will. It appears that they have recently found that their own situation is most readily improved by manipulation of financial markets than by production. I am coming around to the opinion that a consumerist economy was an anomaly of the twentieth century made possible only by a massive spend down in natural resources, notably oil. 

Is there a conspiracy behind this? Less so than an appreciation of the facts perhaps. It seems most likely that the most powerful are also the best informed. If there is an ideology involved, it is a consequence rather than a cause of what they deem pragmatic. 

In principle and procedure there is nothing new about all this, only the scale. I returned from northern (Muslim) Nigeria in the early '70's,  with a clear notion that the Alhaji system of local political administration was essentially based on their license to steal.
Like many Peace Corp volunteers, my culture shock on returning home was greater than on going overseas. I understood that our own culture was/is based on a license to steal granted on the assumption that our interests would be protected. And here as in Nigeria, they were, more or less. In other places not so much. 

Allende's overthrow/murder was a sort a 9/11 for South America. I am informed of this by my Mexican born son in law. He and I can readily relate that happening to the Chicago School of economics. There is certainly tradition behind the mess were in.