Over in the Corner, Mark Hemingway posts a reader letter contending, “What the Democrats are saying is that nobody should have to sacrifice for healthcare, nobody should have to work for healthcare, nobody should even have have to plan for healthcare — maybe Hillary’s slogan should be HEALTHCARE HAPPENS.”

Similarly, I just read a line in Microtrends, with similar tones:

“Perhaps one of Hillary Clinton’s most important insights representing upstate New York was that no child should have to leave his or her hometown to get a good job.’”

#more#

In my gut, I like the sentiment. Anybody with admiration for tradition, small town America, and close bonds of community winces when they see young people departing an old factory town for lack of job opportunities.

(Some believe staying close to home is supremely important: I remember a contributor to the Crunchy-Con blog writing, “I would suggest that moving far away from one’s kin is virtually never a true economic necessity and almost always rooted in selfish desire.”)

Hillary’s first public utterance of that “insight” that I can find came in 2001, sponsoring seven garden-variety grants and credits aimed at helping rural communities.

That’s all nice, I suppose, but if businesses want to leave particular communities – and conversely, don’t want to establish themselves in particular communities – one wonders how hard the government ought to push them to do so. Maybe some communities just aren’t meant to last forever. If a town is the buggy whip capital of the world, the creation of the automobile may mean it will never return to its former glory.

Conversely, Hillary’s statement means every child in every town should be able to find “a good job” in his or her hometown.

Isn’t it pretty darn statist to believe that we can match up the supply of workers with the demand for employees perfectly within towns? No town will have too many workers and too few “good” jobs, and no town will have more “good” jobs than workers? (Without the latter circumstance, how are wages supposed to increase? Ah, Congress will pass another increase in the minimum wage, I suppose.)