Emergency relief -- food, shelter, clothes -- is one thing. Protection, as a matter of policy, from bad decisions (e.g., borrowing without the means to repay) penalizes good decisions. It says to citizens, don't bother to plan, to save, to reason things out, to act with discretion and judgment, because if you do blow it through carelessness or irrationality, along the government rescue wagon will come, bells jingling and dollars flying through the air.

When the course of least resistance works, it becomes the course increasingly preferred by the majority. Where's the incentive to make good decisions if bad decisions pay off? Pain hurts -- yes. It also toughens and strengthens, concentrates the mind wonderfully on those tasks needful to avert it in the future.

Nor are voters, generally speaking, so dumb they never figure out the ruinous consequences -- moral as well as economic -- of rigging outcomes and rewarding bad luck.

Sen. Clinton isn't talking morality -- of this kind anyway -- and she certainly isn't talking economics. She's talking politics -- the acquisition of votes through a species of bribery disguised as good old American compassion.

Blessed are the merciful, we are advised on High Authority. And cursed, in considerable degree, are those whose politicians pretend to preside over a bed of roses in which difficulties wilt away and no one gets pricked by thorns -- and if someone gets pricked anyway, his representatives in Washington will find the culprits, you bet, and make them pay. Them and everybody else around.