The Real Problem With Hillary

The problem with Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate is not that she is a corrupt and dishonest politician, as her critics have charged.  No, the problem with Hillary is that she is just as big a socialist as Bernie Sanders is.  “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good,” she announced to a San Francisco audience in 2004, echoing the Communist Manifesto mantra, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  “We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society,” she once proclaimed as First Lady.  Such statements are a defining characteristic of the socialist philosophy:  attacks on individualism in the name of the “common good” of “society” – always defined and enforced by politicians, never by society as a whole.  And like Sanders, she threatens “the rich” with even more onerous taxes to be used to subsidize the working class (“working families” in the neo-Marxist language of one of her television ads).

Hillary Clinton demonstrated her socialist credentials during the Democratic primary debates with the proud, self-described socialist Bernie Sanders.  Whenever Sanders would excite the audiences of Democrats with Santa Claus-like promises of “free” healthcare, education, housing, welfare payments, and much else, Hillary’s response was to agree with him, promising to increase federal spending by more than $1 trillion over the next ten years.  There was no disagreement over the principles of socialism, only the details.Insurers would have been required to charge the same rates to everyone regardless of age or health, making a mockery of the very word “insurance.”  Costly employer mandates would have forced employers to lower wages and benefits and/or lay off workers; and state governments would have been forced to become “purchasing alliances” for the federal bureaucracy’s central planning scheme.

Members of Congress and all federal employees were to be exempted from Hillarycare, however.  Only the little people (i.e., everyone else) were to be corralled into socialized medicine.

The bizarre thing about “Hillarycare” is that it was an absurdly bureaucratic, Soviet-style central planning program that was promoted by the Clintons barely three years after the final collapse of socialism in the Soviet empire – a collapse caused primarily by the futility of attempting to centrally plan an economy through government “planning” instead of markets – just like “Hillarycare.”

Perhaps “Obamacare,” which has resurrected parts of “Hillarycare,” has been imposed on the American public because so much of it – primarily the younger generation – is unaware of the grotesque failures of twentieth-century socialism.  They should look at the current economic implosion of Venezuela – the latest darling-of-the-Left  “socialist paradise” – to learn some important lessons.

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