Thursday, October 04, 2007

Hillary's Utopia

From The Washington Post:

Former president Bill Clinton has emerged as a clear asset in his wife's campaign for the White House, with Americans offering high ratings to his eight years in office and a solid majority saying they would be comfortable with him as first spouse, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

But Americans said they would not regard the election of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as simply the resumption of her husband's presidency. Instead, two-thirds said she would take her presidency in a different direction, and half of all Americans said they believed that would be a good development. About half of those who said it would be a resumption described that as positive.

I don't imagine that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be little more than a third term for Blow Job Billy. Bill Clinton cared about being high in the polls more than anything else. While he did have a set of core beliefs involving his absolute faith in big government to make the world a better place he was more than willing to set those beliefs aside in order to keep his approval rating high.

Maybe "set aside" isn't the right term. He certainly never did anything to shrink government, after all. It would be more accurate to say that he was willing to sacrifice the advancement of his policy agenda in order to maintain his personal popularity.

Hillary is a horse of a different color. She will attempt to move her agenda forward no matter want the cost. While Bill is a generalized big government loving wonk Hillary is a hard-core socialist. Her goal is to create a network of cradle-to-grave entitlements for the middle class which will bind (enslave would be a better word) them to the central government and make it politically impossible to reduce the size or scope of the federal government in any way whatsoever.

If Hillary is elected president socialized health care will be the beginning, not the end, of her plans to transform the United States.

Let's try a thought experiment. Take 100 residents of New York City and ask them to describe what would happen if the entire NYPD were to simply leave the city and never come back. What you would get in response would be Mad Max type scenarios of chaos, bloodshed rape and arson which would leave the city a burned out shell inhabited by gangs of mutants all trying to get into Charlton Heston's apartment.

What would actually happen is that after a brief period of lawlessness the people would arm themselves and take responsibility for their own safety and even start looking out for each other. Just like the gold fields of California in the 1800's which had no police or military to keep order but had a crime rate approaching zero because everyone was armed and everyone looked out for his neighbor.

What is the difference between the people of California in the 19th century and the people of NYC in the 21st century? Do doctors in New York hospitals give new born babies lobotomies now days? No, nothing that drastic. It's just that the people of New York City have spent their entire lives having certain things done for them and so they can't wrap their minds around the idea of suddenly doing them for themselves.

The know intellectually that things were once different but the knowledge is abstract not concrete and so it doesn't touch their emotions. The idea of there being no police department to catch criminals and discourage crime scares them because there is nothing in their experience to suggest to them that they could protect themselves better than the city government protects them.

The idea that six or seven million armed people each ready to prevent a crime before it happens would keep the streets safer than 40000 armed people who can only respond to the scene after a crime has already occurred never enters their minds. And if you suggest it they react with disbelief and even scorn.

Now take the way that New Yorkers feel about crime and the police (we must have the police to protect us because we cannot protect ourselves and if the cops weren't there we would probably all die) and spread it over the entire nation and make it about health care (if my wife hadn't had a government doctor when she ran into complications during delivery she and my son would both be dead) and food (if the government didn't provide food for us we would all starve to death) and electricity and motor fuel and fresh water and everything else a person needs to live in the modern world.

Take that several generations into the future where the knowledge that people used to get the necessities of life through voluntary exchanges in the free market and that their lives were much more prosperous and free back then is abstract and not concrete (and so does not touch the emotions) so that the default position of the average American is to think that without the federal government to do almost everything for him he would surely die. Get a picture of that utterly dependant society firmly fixed in your mind and you will know what the kind of world that Hillary Clinton and those who think the way she does are trying to build will look like.