Solid Reasons Not to Vote for Hillary

After moving into the White House with her husband the president, Hillary Rodham Clinton published a book, called It Takes A Village, and Other Lessons Children Teach Us. The book was used as a foil by Senator Bob Dole at the 1996 Republican national convention. He said, with about as much passion as Dole ever mustered, "It doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes a family to raise a child." Dole was wrong.

A strong nuclear family is central to raising a child, but not sufficient. It takes a whole network of adults, some relatives, some not. It takes, not only mom and dad, but also the neighbor down the block who gives a young man inspiration, the teacher who encourages a young girl, mentors at church or in sports, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins.

Clinton was also wrong. Her book very explicitly says that in the modern world, the role of village in raising a child is filled by government. Nobody who believes that, much less published it, is qualified to hold the position of President of the United States. In fact, this is precisely the folly of George W. Bush's so-called "No Child Left Behind" bureaucracy.

The village necessary to raise a child is anything but government. It is a network of spontaneous human interactions too complex and too unpredictable to ever be defined by law, administered by a cabinet agency, or reduced to the cold hard numbers of a budget. "Here kid, we're issuing you your mentor for the year." Is it worth offering a subsidy to elderly widowers who fix bicycles for free? Should we require that they get certification from the Department of Social Services? How about a B.A. in child development?

Our government, whether led by Republicans or Democrats, has gotten itself far too deeply into the work of private, voluntary organizations. Unlike commercial corporations, which exist by government license, and often control the economic base of millions of helpless individuals and families, voluntary organizations are an expression of First Amendment rights to speak freely, associate freely, and advocate freely. The village that it takes to raise a child is not even a voluntary organization, it is the freely chosen acts of private individuals.

Remember Hillary Clinton's health care plan? We're living with it now. No, it didn't pass into legislation. Those "Harry and Louise" ads prevented any such thing. But, private HMOs and PPOs proceeded to take over the health care industry, forcing individual private medical practices to knuckle under for fear of losing patients, and gave us exactly the cold, heartless bureaucracy that Harry and Louise warned us against. So government isn't the problem. Private enterprise funding Harry and Louise ads can be just as much the problem as government. But Hillary Clinton probably is not the solution.