Hillary Didn’t Invent Community

In an article on a pleasant suburban community near Washington, Roxanne Sweeney says,  "It's like 'Leave It to Beaver,'" praising the neighborhood's friendliness and strong community ties. Later, reporter Rebecca Kahlenberg writes,

Recently, a group of River Falls mothers used the e-mail group to coordinate food preparation for Roxanne Sweeney when she wasn't feeling well following treatment for colon cancer.

"I can't even count how many meals were brought to me," Sweeney said. "I hate this line because I'm not a Democrat, but this is really an it-takes-a-village sort of place."

No, Ms. Sweeney! Friendship and community were not invented by Hillary Clinton. As the reference to "Leave It to Beaver" suggests, such ties go back long before Senator Clinton put her name on the book "It Takes a Village." And long before "Leave It to Beaver." Family, parish, and village are natural connections that predate not just Clinton but government and even formal social organization. They are the first building blocks of civil society. Clinton's contribution to the topic is to confuse the natural ties of love and neighborliness with the artificial and imposed order of a vast and distant federal government.

As I wrote in a recent article and in Libertarianism: A Primer, Hillary calls for a national consensus and a common vision of what the government should do for families. But there can be no such common consensus in a pluralistic society. People don't agree about all the values involved in rearing children, helping others, worshiping God, and forming associations. That's why a successful society leaves such choices to individuals. Even in the little community of River Falls, it isn't a formal community organization that came to Roxanne Sweeney's aid. It was her friends.

At so many points in our lives, it takes friends, it takes a village, but it doesn't take the federal government.