Charles, I very much enjoyed your observations on Herself’s inability to understand Uber, AirBnB, etc.

A few thoughts:

Hillary Rodham Clinton does not seem to understand the modern economy; worse, she does not understand her own economic thinking. The most notable example of this in her speech was that she blasted Jeb Bush for suggesting that one way to raise Americans’ incomes was for Americans to work more hours, and then complained that American women aren’t working enough hours relative to women in other developed countries. Or: Americans work too much except when they’re not working enough.

On the Bush point, I suspect she is replying to Senator Bernie Sanders without naming him. Sanders has made a point of bemoaning the fact that Americans work more hours than the Japanese, the British, and the French. (When he mentions out-working the French, his audiences always tittle.) In that complaint one can hear the echoes of vintage socialist utopianism, the idea that once the economy has been rationalized we’ll all be free to spend our afternoons writing poetry and collecting wildflowers.

This is a destructive and ignorant way of looking at the world. The most remarkable differences between high-income Americans (those in the top quintile) and low-income Americans (those in the bottom quintile) historically hasn’t been race or parents’ educational attainment or anything of that sort, but the number of household members working full-time. In high-income households, the average number of full-time workers is slightly more than two, meaning that most of those households are composed of a couple whose members both work full-time, and that many of them have an additional full-time earner, too. On the other end, the average number of full-time workers for bottom-quintile households is 0.45, less than one-half of a full-time worker per household. Only 3 percent of top-quintile households have no employed person; 61 percent of bottom-quintile households have no employed person. The truth is that poor people in American do not work nearly enough, and many of them desperately want to work more.

Uber et al. are a way to turn property into capital, allowing people to earn money (sometimes, lots of money) outside of the context of being an employee. That is extraordinarily important to low-income people. For some context, do yourself the favor of checking out Noel King’s eye-opening report on Baltimore’s informal economy, which in many parts of that misgoverned city would be better termed simply “the economy.” Among other things, she shows how Clinton-era economic-development grants went unused by their intended beneficiaries because the paperwork and bureaucratic-compliance necessary to access them constituted too high a fence for many in Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods. The price of starting a business in Maryland is very high; Uberization is one way to reduce or eliminate those costs.

Social engineers of the Obama-Clinton-Bismarck school dislike Uber and the informal economy for the same reason they dislike entrepreneurs: Employees are easier to manage. Employees are, typically, pliant. (F. A. Hayek was right to believe that the move from small proprietorships to a society of corporate salarymen would make centralization and autocracy more socially acceptable.) If the social engineers could figure out a way of getting the corporations and the salarymen without the entrepreneurs, they surely would.

Charles, you write that Mrs. Clinton behaves like a product of the 1930s. I think I know what’s on your mind. Readers might enjoy knowing that we recently visited the Hoover Dam, that gigantic monument to Mussolini-style corporatism reconfigured for American sensibilities—social engineering as literal engineering—and that during our tour Charles and I were treated to a brief paean to OSHA regulations and union-mandated cigarette breaks by our tour guide, a human advertisement for the social engineers’ cracked utopianism.

I know Herself’s voters when I encounter them, but I do not believe that they are the future.