Rich Lowry takes a hard look at Hillary! Clinton's tin-eared speech promoting collectivism over individuality. He pays particular attention to the distortions in that speech.
Hillary Clinton has identified a grievous flaw in the contemporary American economy: It leaves "it all up to the individual." This hateful individualism is allegedly driving income inequality and destroying the American Dream.
Clinton calls it "the 'on your own' society," displaying a liberal Democrat's curious aversion to people doing things on their own. In contrast, 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. She actually is not interested in sharing anything, but instead hogging all the credit for economic growth in the 1990s for her husband and, by extension, herself.
Clinton cites figures to paint a picture of an immiserated middle class, but avoids the main event. As Democratic economist Stephen Rose notes in his new book, Social Stratification in the United States, once people outside their prime working years are excluded — the elderly and the young — the median income for an American family is $63,000. Which, in the words of the Washington Post, "in most parts of the country buys a pretty comfortable middle-class lifestyle."
She maintains that corporations are taking more and more of national income for themselves, leaving workers in the cold. But according to Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, labor's share of national income was a nearly constant 64.9 percent from 1960 to 2006. She says "the percentage of taxes paid by corporations have fallen," when the percentage of taxes paid by corporations was 11.5 percent in 2006, higher than it was in 2000, at 8.2 percent.
Read the whole thing. Hillary! wants it both ways: a longing for the 1990s to return but an abandonment of those very policies that made the 1990s economy grow like free trade and growing globalization. Lowry points out all those inconvenient little facts that Clinton has to either ignore or distort to support her growing list to port. (Though if she lists any further she risks capsizing and turning turtle.) Lowry rightfully closes by pointing out that if you long for a return to the 1990s, the worst thing you could do is vote for Hillary!
Until my political conversion I never questioned the mantra:
Government stay out of our bedrooms BUT give us free health care, free education, free art, cheap gas, an AIDS cure, a stem-cell cure-all for all disease, an end to violence, an end to hate, an end to war and while you’re at it feed, cloth, house and protect all the world’s poor.
For me the divide is not between red state/blue state but between Individualism and Collectivism.
That said, I loathe serfdom.