Hillary Deciding Our Destiny?

Are you ready for Hillary? As NRO’s Charles C. W. Cooke asks, is she the “spirit animal of a washed-out and intellectually bankrupt generation?”

(Hillary’s country is one) “in which tax rates can be set without reference to global competition; in which the taxi commission and the trade union are the heroes while the entrepreneurs and the dissenters are a royal pain in the ass; in which families can simply not be trusted to determine which services suit their needs and which do not. It’s a country in which our heinously outdated, grossly illiberal, neo-Prussian educational system is to be set more firmly in place — even as it crumbles and falls. It is a country in which the state must determine which firms are Good and which firms are Bad, and reward or punish them according to its whim. It is a country in which Upton Sinclair is an up-and-coming writer, and in which anybody who doubts the efficacy of federal control is in danger of falling headfirst into a rendering vat.

Most important, perhaps, it is an America in which one’s opportunity to customize one’s life is reserved to the social and sexual spheres. Sure, the freelance writer in Brooklyn and the on-off driver who picks him up might think that they are entering into a mutually beneficial contract. The backpacking student from California and the Chicago apartment owner who hosts him might think that they have been liberated by technology, and the stay-at-home parent who makes knick-knacks and sells them on Etsy might think that he has a sweet deal. But from Hillary Clinton’s intolerably prescriptive perspective, they have failed to think through the consequences of their arrangements. One can tell a great deal about a person’s broader worldview by asking them a simple question: “Should one person who hopes to pay another person to perform a legal service be restricted from doing so by the state?” That Clinton used the words “crack” and “down” when attempting to answer that inquiry should worry you.

Once upon a time in a faraway place, many of the policies preferred by the Democratic party of 2015 were at least practically defensible. Because most of the rest of the world had been destroyed by total war, the federal government could impose pretty much whatever taxes and regulations it liked without fear that employers would move elsewhere. Because most people worked in a single industry for their entire careers, they were often in genuine need of both a uniform system of schooling and of adequate representation in the workplace. Because good information was generally hard to get hold of, bureaucrats could act as virtuous protectors of the unwittingly ignorant, and not as cynical reapers of public treasure. That country is gone, and in its place is a big, diverse, fractured mess. We are all struggling to work out how to navigate our way through the chaos. But only some of us are taking aim at the navigators.”