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The Real Hillary’s Raw Socialism

Sen. Hillary Clinton shared on Tuesday her vision of the U.S. economy under her executive stewardship. She should change her party affiliation — or the name of her party.

Speaking in New Hampshire, Clinton acknowledged that instead of the “ownership society” that George W. Bush has promoted throughout his presidency, she prefers a “we’re all in it together society” where prosperity is “broadly shared.”

This is the sort of “it takes a village” rhetoric that tickles the ears of the left, and which can’t give up its romantic notions of a collectivist utopia.

Dreams of the left, however, always turn out to be nightmares, and the world has seen its share of all-in-it-together societies that have failed. The Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea and the worker’s paradise/island prison of Cuba enter the mind right away.

Then there are the teetering soft-socialist systems of Europe, while socialist/communist power grabs now sapping the wealth and strength of Zimbabwe and Venezuela are contemporary lessons that can’t be ignored.

Given these examples, do we really want to turn America into another experiment in collectivism? Are we willing to trade hard-won freedoms for government-provided security? Would we be willing to force those who don’t want to participate into such a system?

Incredibly, many Americans would say yes to all three. An entitlement mentality has corrupted our nation and left-leaning politicians such as Clinton, as well as cynical chameleon opportunists, are skilled at exploiting the feelings of those who are driven by envy or guilt.

The root problem of a socialist — or village or nanny — state is that it robs people of their humanity and removes the incentives that bring economic progress. It produces a soul-draining apathy.

The cradle-to-grave system that is the hallmark of socialism provides no motivation for its beneficiaries to work harder, longer and smarter — all keys to greater prosperity. Irresponsibility, inefficiency and waste — enemies of economic expansion — are encouraged when property is wholly or mostly owned by the state rather than private individuals or corporations.

Consider the resource-rich Soviet Union. It held vast reserves of oil, natural gas, diamonds and gold, yet because the system killed incentives and property was (allegedly) commonly owned, it eventually collapsed. The dynamic economy that so many Western analysts had warned us about was nothing more than a series of five-year flops.

We’re not here to label Hillary Clinton a socialist, but we really don’t have to; she’s done that job for us. The economic proposals she’s lining up behind expose an undeniable affinity for raw socialism.

Promoting a leftist orthodoxy is not some new campaign ploy for Clinton. She’s been at it for some time. At a 2004 fundraiser, she told supporters that “for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that (tax cuts) short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Earlier this year she promised that a third Clinton administration would seize oil company profits and use the money for government projects.

Who can forget her plan to force a universal health care plan on an ostensibly free people? That’s not a free-market solution.

Sift through Clinton’s history and it’s clear that her swing to the left goes back much further than her husband’s first term in the White House. Barbara Olson, a former federal general counsel and congressional investigator who tragically died on Flight 77 on Sept. 11, 2001, said in a 2000 interview that Clinton “has a political ideology that has its roots in Marxism.”

In “Hell To Pay,” Olson’s 1999 book on “The unfolding story of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” she writes about the New York’s senator’s attempt to mask her socialist ambitions in a children’s rights veneer. The dust jacket describes Clinton as a “sixties radical” who “has maintained her ties to the radical left.”

Inside, Olson tells of how much influence Saul Alinsky, the radical who once said that the “Reds’ platform stood for all the right things,” had on her as she formed her political philosophy in moving from a Goldwater Girl of the Midwest to an East Coast activist on the left.

Clinton’s supporters will argue that those days don’t count, that she has mainstreamed her views. What concerns us is that we might have to wait until she’s elected president for those denials to be revealed as bunk.

Source: Investor’s Business Daily

Hillary Vs. the “On Your Own” Society

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.

Clinton portrays the 1990s as a Paradise Lost that only she and her policies can rediscover. She wants “to hit the restart button on the 21st century and redo it the right way.” Like not having a tech bubble burst after it grew to unsustainable proportions in the late 1990s? Like not suffering from corporate scandals that stemmed from loose practices in the same period?

No one can deny that the 1990s were good, but they wouldn’t hold up to the kind of demagogic critique of the economy Hillary makes now. She says we can’t “get tough” on China because of our debt, but President Clinton too was “soft” on China — all recent American presidents have had basically the same policy toward Beijing. She complains of CEO compensation increasing, but it grew right through the 1990s. In fact, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has made a Hillary-esque critique of the 1990s economy: “Most of the gains from the 1990s boom went to the people at the top.”

The real news from Clinton’s speech is the way she, in keeping with the leftward shift of her party, turns her back on her husband’s actual policies. It is too inconvenient for her to explain the sources of the deficit reduction in the 1990s besides his (relatively inconsequential) tax increase: first, Clinton’s huge cut in defense spending; then a budget deal with Republicans that reduced the rate of growth of Medicare and cut taxes on capital gains; then, a wondrous flow of revenue into the federal treasury from capital gains and the “rich getting richer.”

She doesn’t even mention welfare reform, although it is largely thanks to it that the bottom fifth of families had a 35 percent increase in income from 1991 to 2005. She talks of free trade as something to fear, when President Clinton courageously championed NAFTA and other free-trade initiatives, providing boosts to the U.S. and global economies. Of course, she leaves out all the deregulation and how important it was that President Clinton let Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan pursue his low-inflation policies without political interference.

None of this fits into her narrative of an economy needing wide-ranging government intervention to escape the nefarious consequences of individuals left to act “on their own.” One can only conclude that if you liked the 1990s boom, don’t elect this woman.

Source: Town Hall

Republican candidate Mitt Romney blasts Hillary’s socialist plans

In Iowa today, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney ridiculed Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton as being such a fan of big government that she couldn’t even get elected in France!

Ex-Clinton FBI chief Louis Freeh pushing Rudy for president

Louis Freeh, Democrat Bill Clinton’s FBI director, is going over to the other side in a big way today - endorsing Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, the Daily News has learned.

The high-profile endorsement is a boon to the former mayor, whose views on security and terrorism can only benefit from having an international lawman like Freeh in his corner, experts said.

“Any endorsement that lets Rudy talk about fighting crime and terrorism is good for him,” said GOP consultant Dan Schnur. “And if Giuliani and [Hillary] Clinton are the nominees, you can be sure that Louis Freeh ends up in the front row of every debate, just to try and knock her off her game.”

Freeh’s defection to Team Rudy is part of a gradual transformation by the former top G-man from one-time friend of the Clintons to outspoken critic, blaming the former President for raining scandal down upon the White House, and for being soft on terrorism in the years before 9/11.

“Until 9/11,” Freeh wrote in his 2005 book, “My FBI,” about America’s counterterrorism efforts, “we lacked the political leadership and more important the political will to do what had to be done.”

Critics saw such digs as an attempt by Freeh, who was FBI director from 1993 until a few months before 9/11, to avoid responsibility for the World Trade Center attacks.

Freeh also was scathing about Bill Clinton’s personal failings, particularly his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky - a matter Freeh’s FBI had to investigate.

“The problem was with Bill Clinton - the scandals and the rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones never ended,” he wrote in his book. “Whatever moral compass the President was consulting was leading him in the wrong direction.”

But it is Freeh’s get-tough approach to crime and terrorism - he has long advocated expanding U.S. intelligence gathering around the globe - that will likely take center stage at today’s planned endorsement.

It’s a message that certainly fits with Giuliani’s recent rhetoric on the presidential campaign trail, where he often argues that Democrats want to go back to playing “defense” on terrorism, while Republicans understand the importance of playing “offense.”

There are other similarities between the two men: both were raised in Italian-American households, spent their early careers prosecuting Mafia cases together as federal prosecutors in New York, and Giuliani’s term as mayor largely coincided with Freeh’s stint as FBI director.

Even the setting for today’s endorsement - Times Square - is intended to send a message. It is meant to highlight Giuliani’s efforts at battling crime and cleaning up a once dangerous and tattered environment, a skill he has suggested could be just as useful in Iraq today as New York of the 1990s.

Source: NY Daily News

Hillary is an equal opportunity annoyer

By Cal Thomas

Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has unveiled her economic vision. Should she be given the power to implement it, we can say goodbye to the prosperity and opportunity we have enjoyed since the Reagan years.

In a speech at Manchester School of Technology in New Hampshire, Clinton said it’s time to replace President Bush’s “ownership society,” which she called “on your own,” with a society based on shared responsibility and prosperity.

Clinton said she prefers a “we’re all in it together” society: “I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none.”

Doesn’t such a society exist elsewhere? It’s called socialism, where government has sought to make all things economically equal and the only equality is that all are equally poor.

Wasn’t defeating such a society precisely why we fought and won the Cold War? Why does Sen. Clinton wish to embrace the principles of the losing side?

Clinton has merely updated the old and discredited (except among socialist dictators) Karl Marx saying: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Clinton’s remarks came at a school whose purpose is to train high school kids for careers in such industries as construction, automotive and graphic arts.

She told them, “We have sent a message to our young people that if you don’t go to college . . . that you’re thought less of in America. We have to stop this.”

Her assertion is bunk, but it is the typical class warfare bunk that comes from rich white liberals who want to take money from one group of people and give to others who didn’t earn it in hopes they will become loyal Democratic voters.

This is not the philosophy that made America what it is. This is not a land of equal outcome, but of equal opportunity commensurate with one’s talents, interests and drive.

In his “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith wrote: “It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. . . . (Kings and ministers) are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.

“Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.”
What have we come to? We once taught our young people the virtues of hard work, saving, personal responsibility and accountability for one’s actions, chastity before and fidelity and commitment in marriage, honesty, integrity and virtue).

We now teach them entitlement, victimhood, class envy and rights to other people’s money. When one robs a bank, it’s a crime. When government takes our money, it’s called a tax. Same result.

There is something else about Clinton’s speech that offends. She suggested students at a technical high school are inferior to those of higher social rank. This, too, is typical white liberal bunk.

Has it occurred to her that many students prefer technical careers - and some make excellent livings at them - to the jobs held by the elites and that some of those jobs fit them for nothing of value?

Sen. Clinton should consider the wisdom of a former president, who said, “The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. . . . The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful.” (Calvin Coolidge inaugural address, March 4, 1925)

Now there’s a real economic vision!

Source: Tuscon Citizen

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Hillary Clinton boasts of support from "white Americans"

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