Saturday, July 28, 2007

President Reagan Smacks Down Hillary’s Public Service Academy

The Associated Press reported that Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton told University of South Carolina student Democrats that she would create a national academy to train public servants.

"I'm going to be asking a new generation to serve," she said. "I think just like our military academies, we need to give a totally all-paid education to young men and women who will serve their country in a public service position."

If you want to talk about an idea whose time hasn’t come, and never will, this has to be on the top of the list.

Only a Democrat could love it.

As President Reagan said: “Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

These are words that would be emblazoned above the entrance to the Hillary Rodham Clinton Public Service Academy.

In the case of creating a national academy to train public servants, President Reagan also had an appropriate remark, which he originally aimed at Congress but which would apply equally well in this circumstance: “Cures were developed for which there were no known diseases.”

To me, the phrase “a totally all-paid education to young men and women who will serve their country in a public service position,” translates to a government funded indoctrination to create a new class, the new ruling class of government bureaucrats. This new government-created class would be untainted by exposure to the environments of big business, small business, entrepreneurial activity, military concerns, or even to the legal profession from whence come a disproportionate number of our current public servants.

In other words, before teaching them anything about management, the government would teach the members of its new class how government runs everything, and the word “privatize” would be stricken from their vocabulary.

However, as President Reagan reminded us: “We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down.”

Who would be the members of the new ruling class? Certainly not individuals like Hillary Clinton. Upon graduation from Wellesley, Hillary pursued the big bucks in law at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi. When Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas in 1979, Hillary became the first female partner in the history of the Rose Law Firm.

Since the Hillary Rodham Clintons of the world would not be the primary candidates for Hillary’s public service academy, I wonder who she thinks would?

I envision the prospective student body of the public service academy would be made up of individuals who couldn’t bear the stress and competitiveness of careers in business, medicine, law, and science, or even education. Further, I think they would be antagonistic towards business and the professions, and would be particularly concerned that they enjoyed too much freedom from governmental oversight, control, and regulation.

Why would I think they would be so anti-business? Because that’s already a hallmark of public servants, to be resentful and suspicious of anything that isn’t tightly regulated and controlled by government.

President Reagan noted that: “Government is the people's business and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid.”

However, most public servants believe that people and business are not taxed enough, because government entities never feel that their budgets are sufficient.

To that, President Reagan would have remarked: “The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.”

Obviously, Hillary feels differently, and wants to institutionalize public service, just as she disastrously attempted government control of health care during the first year of her husband’s presidency. Fortunately, she blundered so badly that the Democrats lost their forty-year dominance of Congress.

She doesn’t want to take the chance of that ever happening again, hence her desire to indoctrinate a ruling class in a “public service madrasah.”

As she told some of her supporters after her speech, one of the reasons she was running for president was to have universal health care.

As President Reagan would have said, “There you go again.”

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