It Takes a Hillage

David Boaz reports:

The image of Hillary Clinton on a giant screen reminded me of one of the proposals in her book, It Takes a Village.

The book epitomizes the nanny state in contemporary America. Beginning with the sensible if overused proverb that "it takes a village" to raise children, she ends up calling on all 300 million Americans to raise each child. Of course, we can't possibly all take responsibility for millions of children. Clinton calls for "a consensus of values and a common vision of what we can do today, individually and collectively, to build strong families and communities." But there is not and -- let's be honest -- cannot be any such collective consensus.

In any free society, millions of people will have different ideas about how to form families, how to rear children, and how to associate voluntarily with others. Those differences are not just a result of a lack of understanding each other; no matter how many Harvard seminars and National Conversations we have, we will never come to a national consensus on such intimate moral matters. Clinton implicitly recognizes that when she insists that there will be times when "the village itself [she means the federal government] must act in place of parents" and accept "those responsibilities in all our names through the authority we vest in government." She fundamentally rejects the American tradition of liberty. She says that government must make the decisions about how we raise our children.

To some people,there are no limits on government.