[An earlier version was first posted on PoliticalStorm.com as Hillary Channels Willie]
“Slick Willie.” No, not that “Slick Willie,” from the law school library of yore.
It’s “Slick” Willie Sutton. Willie (“Why do you rob banks?”) Sutton. “Because that’s where the money is!” Willie famously replied – which is not news to Hill or Bill, obviously, because they’ve been going where the money is ever since leaving the White House.
That’s how, Hillary explained, she’ll pay for all her new entitlement programs, all those new “rights” – by taxing “Wall Street,” and “corporations,” and “the super-rich.” “Not because we resent success,” she professed, but “that’s where the money is.”
Some Libertarians (the more-rhetorically iconoclastic ones) have long translated “taxes” as “theft.” They will revel with vindication from Hillary’s adopting Willie Sutton’s approach.
Willie, in that old apocryphal joke, didn’t answer the question’s intended meaning, which was “Why do you rob?” It was his nature to rob. His only concern was where and how to rob.
Whether Hill’s red-meat line to her “base” belied a confession or was a Freudian slip, it plainly manifests a Hillarian instinct, deeply ingrained in her world view.
It’s Hillary’s nature to create “rights” – not rights in individuals, but rights in groups – and to tax others to pay for them. She sees the population as a bundle of groups, exploitable, panderable groups. Voting blocs.
She creates “rights” in one group and another and another –
• Mothers – a particularly-favored group – have the “right” to be paid for not working during “family leave” time, and the “right” to free babysitting afterward.
• Their children, before too long, then have the “right” to free college.
• Student loan borrowers have the “right” to be “liberated” from their student debt (but presumably not “liberated” from the college degrees they bought with it, or the income they’ve earned from them. Query: Can that “liberation” be retroactive, so all college grads now get a refund? Does the Class of ‘72 have the “right”?)
• Anyone who works has a “right” to a “living wage” (which is presumably higher than the mere garden-variety “minimum wage,” and regardless of their economic productivity).
• Small businesses have the “right” to bank loans for whatever they can conjure, because, in Hillary’s America, “if you can dream it, you should be able to build it” – with nary a business plan, and with somebody else’s money. (Will those debts later be “liberated”?)
• And of course the “right” to free healthcare.
These are not “rights” of the caliber of the right to free speech, free exercise of religion or freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They’re not the “self-evident . . . Creator-endowed . . . inalienable” kind of “rights.”
These are merely “claims.”
Hillary does not pretend that satisfying these newly-invented claims costs nothing. They’re only “free” to the recipients, who get something for nothing. Hillary knows that others have to pay: Those that have more than she thinks they need pay for those she thinks should have more.
Thus, all “together” now, she leads Democrats to go after “where the money is.”
This is a vision of a fixed American pie, incapable of growing. It resorts to taking from some and giving it to others, upon the assumption that whole swaths of Americans are incapacitated. It does not inspire their innovation, creativity, industry, dynamism, ingenuity or self-reliance. It does not summon individuals to combine their talents and work ethic to achieve a shared vision of greater prosperity, with greater security.
She plays, instead, a zero-sum game, fomenting a tug-of-war between those who get and those who it give up, an intramural combat for slices of stagnation.
Hillary challenges her claimant groups, “Ask only what more the country can do for you, not what you can do for your country.”
She will neither make America “stronger” nor bring it “together.”