PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
by Ralph R. Reiland,
Professor of Free Enterprise
"I know what it takes to run the country," Hillary Clinton told an interviewer at New York's RNN cable station in January.
The first thing wrong with that statement is that we don't need anyone to "run the country." The last time Hillary tried to run anything she wanted to put physicians and patients in jail if they displayed an insufficient level of submission to her one-size-fits-all master plan for medical care.
It's true that things aren't perfect in this country, or in medical care,but to put Hillary in charge of fixing the holes is like putting Mussolini in charge in order to get the trains running on time.
What Mrs. Clinton seems to not understand is that markets, however imperfect, generally and automatically do a better job of organizing an economy than any set of government planners or political appointees. What the record shows, over time and in every region of the world, is that millions of people, pursuing their own interests in their own way, are better than government at running an economy, both in terms of delivering the goods and maximizing individual freedom.
Simply put, government is no match for markets when it comes to developing a culture in which creativity, liberty, competition, incentives, efficiency and commerce flourish.
The second thing wrong with Hillary's statement, even if we wanted a controlling and expert-in-everything chieftain, is that there's no evidence that she knows how to run anything.
Over the past 24 years, Mrs. Clinton has had three big jobs, all due to nepotism, and she's zero-for-three in terms of performance.
In 1983, then-Governor Bill Clinton put Hillary in charge of reforming the education system in Arkansas as a way to improve the state's position of being the second-poorest in the nation in terms of per capita income, richer only than Mississippi. Taxes were raised, millions of additional dollars were shoveled into the schools, the student-teacher ratio was cut to 13-to-1, and Hillary applied her much-publicized expertise in planning and implementation.
Paul J. Gessing, director of government affairs at the National Taxpayers Union, reported the results: "Twenty years later, the state still lags in 49th place in per capita income. Over the past 15 years, national test scores for Arkansas students have remained relatively flat and nearly 60 percent of students at Arkansas public colleges and universities need one or more remedial courses because they did not effectively learn the basics prior to entering college."
The good news is that Arkansas is still trouncing Mississippi.
Hillary's second big job was bringing her former Rose Law Firm partners, Webster Hubbell and Vince Foster, to Washington to serve during Bill Clinton's first term as, respectively, Associate Attorney General and Deputy White House Counsel. Hubbell ended up in prison after being convicted of cheating his clients and law firm out of $482,000. Foster, tasked with everything from storing records in inconspicuous places to putting a good spin on Travelgate, was found dead in Fort Marcy Park in the outskirts of D.C.
Mrs. Clinton's third big task was medical reform.
"The debacle is well known," writes Alexander Cockburn, a self-described leftist radical and co-editor of the newsletter CounterPunch. "In early 1993,64 percent of all Americans favored a system of national health care. By the
time Mrs. Clinton's 1,342-page bill, generated in secret, landed in Congress she had managed to offend the very Democratic leadership essential to making health reform a reality."
Hillary's 1993 defeat on medical reforms "remains one of the great avoidable disasters of the last century in American politics," asserts Cockburn. "Politicians don't care to admit they messed up, and Mrs. Clinton is no exception to the rule. In fact, she is entirely incapable of conceding error."
In large part because they'd seen Hillary in action, the voting public turned control of both the House and Senate over to the Republicans in 1994. The Republicans hadn't held the majority in the House for 40 years. If Hillary was what the Democrats meant by government, the voters wanted no more of it.
Responding to the report by Army Gen. David Petraeus on the Iraqi war, Mrs. Clinton told Petraeus that the assessment he provided required "a willing suspension of disbelief."
More accurately, to buy Hillary's claim that she knows how to "run the country," given her consistent record of mismanagement, requires a full-blown "willing suspension of disbelief."
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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris
University in Pittsburgh.
Ralph R. Reiland
Phone: 412-884-4541
E-mail: _rrreiland@aol.com_ (mailto:rrreiland@aol.com)
"Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University, the owner Amel's Restaurant, and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review."
