Hillary Clinton On Her Own - Road to the Middle Class

WE’VE ALREADY expectorated here on Sen. Clinton’s characterization of President Bush’s Ownership Society as an “on your own” society. It is deeply offensive to the American spirit to claim that the independence secured to Americans by their work and wealth is a selfish and individualistic thing.

Of course, Rich Lowry, comments

she offers a collectivist vision of “shared responsibility for shared prosperity,” making the case for it based on a farrago of mistruths about the state of the economy

And the first mistruth is the idea that a high-tax high-spending state has anything to do with sharing anything. Government is always about force and compulsion. It is the democratic majority voting to tax the rest of the country to spend money on its projects. Sharing and responsibility are things that people do out of trust and reciprocity, not out of compulsion.

Now she wants “to hit the restart button on the 21st century and redo it the right way,” she says.

Sorry, Senator. I’d say that the achievement of President Bush in avoiding a major economic meltdown in 2001-2002 (remember: it was the biggest bear market of our lives) is something to be celebrated on both sides of the aisle. It makes the idea of hitting the restart button not merely ignorant but dangerous. You want to go back and go through all that again? And risk getting the policy mix wrong? And put the American people in harm’s way again? Come on Senator, you know better than that.

The problem with speeches by Democratic politicians that utterly misrepresent the past, that completely miss the contribution of spending restraint and capital gains tax cuts to the prosperity of the 1990s, that utterly blanks out on the touch-and-go months of 2001-2002 in the aftermath of the collapse of the tech bubble, is that they fail to educate the very ignorant Democratic party faithful about economic reality.

You could say that Democratic leaders and the Democratic base like it that way. But the American people are going to have to pay for this misrepresentation some time down the road.

Because when you don’t look at the past with an open mind it means that you are going to have to learn the lessons of the past the hard way.

And that, in an elite politician like Senator Clinton, is inexcusable.

Because it is never the suits that pay the price. It is the ordinary people.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.