Hillary Clinton and the "basic bargain"

Hillary Clinton explained her vision for America in a guest commentary she co-authored for the Denver Post last Thursday.

Senator Clinton said the promise of American life rests on what she calls a "basic bargain." The "basic bargain," she contends, is that "all of us should have the opportunity to live up to our God-given potential, and the responsibility to make the most of it."

She didn't explain exactly who made this bargain, or exactly when, or exactly who is supposed to deliver the goods, but she gives the "basic bargain" a lot of credit. "In the twentieth century," the senator wrote, "that basic bargain built the greatest middle class the world has ever known."

The "basic bargain" concept may be the most revealing thing Hillary Clinton has ever put forward about herself.

Hillary Clinton contrasts her "basic bargain" with what she calls the "different direction" of the Bush administration, "the mistaken belief that when the wealthy do even better, the middle class will eventually get their share."

In fact, what she describes as a "different direction" is only a difference of degree, not of kind.

Both the "basic bargain" and the "different direction" start from the premise that wealth is immoral unless it is providing assistance to people who had nothing to do with earning it.

What if that's not true?

Wealthy people in America are not exactly living on land grants from the king of England, collecting tribute from powerless peasants under their control.

People get wealthy in America by inventing something the rest of us want to buy, or by putting in long years of study and training for fields like medicine and law, or by working insane hours in a business they built themselves, or by risking their money in a promising business built by someone else, or by being the descendant of someone who earned a lot of money and chose to take care of his or her family, which is everyone's right in a free country.

Wealthy people in America don't owe anybody an explanation. Unless they've taken money by force or by fraud, their wealth has been created by providing something of value, something that people will pay to acquire.

In contrast, let's look closely at Hillary Clinton's "basic bargain."

"All of us should have the opportunity to live up to our God-given potential, and the responsibility to make the most of it," the senator wrote.

If you are sitting at the counter at Denny's over a Grand Slam Breakfast, you can say things like that and sound perfectly reasonable. But if you're a member of the United States Senate who is running for President of the United States, you had better explain what you mean by "should."

"Should" is the language of government compulsion. "All of us should have the opportunity" means the government is going to take money out of people's paychecks and use it for the benefit of someone else. It means the government will give the money you earned to someone who has yet to realize his or her "God-given potential," a rather open-ended target which can be expected to line up with the wish-list of reliably Democratic voting blocs.

Senator Clinton apparently recognizes that the longer you think about this idea, the less you will care for it. In the time it takes to type a comma, she rushes to add that those who receive this opportunity should have "the responsibility to make the most of it."

What a statement. It contains the hidden assumption that people on government assistance have acted irresponsibly and blown their opportunities. It's either an admission that the Great Society programs were a complete waste of money or it is a craven pander to the voters who think, shall we say, not highly of welfare recipients.

The second part of the "basic bargain" carries the implied "should" but there is no hint of how government compulsion would be used to force people to carry out their "responsibility." America is not a Dickens novel and government assistance is not a workhouse. People who accept government assistance and fail to get their lives together just carry their problems into the next election cycle, where they are hauled before cameras to justify more efforts to provide "opportunity."

Hillary Clinton's scrambled economic theory credits her "basic bargain" with creating the middle class in America and blames the Bush administration's "different direction" for stagnating wages and higher living costs.

Might there be another explanation?

One explanation for stagnating wages in America might be the population growth driven by illegal immigration. More workers competing for the same jobs certainly prevents upward pressure on labor costs. At the same time, population growth drives up the price of housing as more families circle the musical chairs of a housing supply limited by environmental policies that discourage real estate development and tax policies that no longer favor the construction of rental units.

Another explanation might be the "free trade" agreements that allow American companies to move their manufacturing operations to low-wage countries and ship their finished goods back to the American market without tariffs or penalties. Senator Clinton says in her commentary that she would pay for some of her "opportunity" program by eliminating "wasteful business subsidies." She might rethink that when she finds out (or when you find out) that some of those subsidies were put in place to keep job-creating businesses from moving all the jobs to India.

These are problems that cannot be fixed by raising the tax rate on high-income Americans, even if you spent every dime of the money on the senator's God-given-potential project.

The more interesting part of the "basic bargain" statement is Senator Clinton's unwitting revelation of her core beliefs, which turn out to be quite different than the picture she has always chosen to present to the world.

The "basic bargain" boils down to this: behave yourself, and you will be taken care of. Do what you're supposed to do, and you will be provided with the essential necessities of life.

And she said she didn't want to bake cookies and have teas.

Hillary Clinton is a 1950s housewife in an Armani pantsuit.

She's a good little girl at her mommy's kitchen table.

She's a Victorian woman with her eyes closed, thinking of England.

Good God.

The first female president of the United States is not going to be a woman who believes that good behavior gives everyone the right to be supported by someone else. The first female president of the United States will be a woman who understands that government does not create wealth, someone who understands that freedom does not permit government-dictated economic outcomes, someone who treats all Americans with respect and does not divide the nation into those who should feel guilty and those who should feel entitled.

The first female president of the United States will not be a woman who presents herself as the world's leading feminist while basing her career and her policies on the parasitic manipulations of a pre-feminist, victimized, second-class citizen.

She's no bargain.


Copyright 2006

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