Mrs. Clinton’s Ode to Serfdom

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, February 06, 2016

Hillary Rodham Clinton is not qualified to be president of the United States of America, because she doesn’t know what the United States of America are.

Terry Shumaker, former U.S. ambassador to Trinidad (I wonder what that gig cost him) and current abject minion in the service of Mrs. Clinton, quotes Herself telling an audience in New Hampshire: “Service is the rent we pay for living in this great country.”

There is a very old English word for people who are required to perform service as a rent for their existence, and that word is serf. Serfdom is a form of bondage.

Americans are not serfs. We are not sharecroppers on Herself’s farm or in vassalage to that smear of thieving nincompoopery in Washington that purports to rule us.

We don’t owe you any damned rent.

The American proposition is precisely the opposite of what Herself imagines: The U.S. government exists at our sufferance, not the other way around. We have governments because there are some things that we as individuals have a hard time doing through private enterprise, and we have a federal government because there are things that the several states cannot manage separately, such as national defense and border security. (And, bang-up job on the latter, Washington.)

A president isn’t a prince, and a citizen isn’t a serf.

Herself’s invocation of serfdom is the logical extension of “You Didn’t Build That”-ism, the backward philosophy under which the free citizen is obliged to justify his life and his prosperity to the state, in order to satisfy the economic self-interest, status-seeking, and power-lust of such lamentable specimens as Elizabeth Warren, a ridiculous little scold who has never done a single useful thing in her entire public life. The American model is precisely the opposite: Government has to justify itself to us. The states created the federal government, not the other way around, and the citizens created the states, not the other way around.

We don’t owe these jackasses any service. They owe us service: services they routinely fail to perform. We’ve got jihadis shooting up California while the government doesn’t even bother to track visa overstays or properly scan entrants from Pakistan by way of Saudi Arabia (because what could possibly go wrong in that scenario?) in spite of being legally obliged to do so. Instead, the powers that be in Washington are literally masturbating the day away when they aren’t busy poisoning veterans to death with dope.

These people—these people—are going to lecture us on citizenship? How about you skip the homilies and do your damned jobs?

Of course Americans perform service: in our families, in our churches, in civic organizations, through charity. We serve because we believe in it, not because we have to justify our consumption of O2 to some despicable low-rent Lady Macbeth who is so keenly aware of her own profiteering and corruption that she violated a stack of federal statutes to keep her work correspondence away from proper oversight. We may be called to justify ourselves before God one day, but not before that.

Herself imagines the United States of America to be a nation of serfs. Whom do you think she imagines as their overlord?

And that is why any sane and self-respecting country would have kept this woman far away from any public office, much less let her flirt with the presidency.