Bonds for babies: democrats discover the ownership society.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: Columns

You PROBABLY MISSED it, but there already was an "idea primary" in the 2008 election. It lasted two weeks and nobody won.

In September, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) strolled into a Congressional Black Caucus forum, belted "Brooklyn's in the house!" to rev up some of her backers from New York, and fielded a question about Social Security. Clinton, who typically clings to her script as if it were the last raft off the Poseidon, got a little too comfortable and started to improvise.

"I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time," she said, "so when that young person turns 18, if they have finished high school, they will be able to access it to go to college." There were no more details; she mentioned the idea, and then she moved on.

Immediately, the Clinton campaign remembered why their candidate usually sticks to her lines. The Drudge Report mocked the idea in a yelping banner headline: "A BOND IN EVERY BASSINET: HILLARY PROPOSES $5,000 FOR EVERY U.S. BABY." "Should Clinton become the Democratic nominee," declared Larry Sabato, the ubiquitous pundit who directs the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, "she may have handed a powerful issue to the Republican candidate." One Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, announced that his rival thought "the American people are stupid."

Ironically, Clinton had been poaching in a traditionally Republican territory. After all, she was proposing a bond that a child would own, something that would give him or her some sense of responsibility. This was not part of the traditional menu of Democratic ideas. Indeed, it has roots in an idea popular in free market circles.

In 1962 the libertarian economist Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax, under which welfare bureaucracies would disappear and the government would simply send checks to people under a certain income level. Charles Murray, author of the seminal welfare critique Losing Ground, offered an updated version of Friedman's proposal in his 2006 book In Our Hands. Both concepts started as thought experiments, and both reached the same conclusion: The recipients of transfer payments can manage that money better than a welfare state Can.

Stung by the wide-ranging criticism, Clinton backed down. On October 9 she said baby bonds were "on the back burner," and the next day her campaign staff assured reporters that the bonds were "off the table." But another version of the idea was percolating...