Governor Sarah Palin is in hot water again, this time for likening our national debt to slavery. She did this in a speech Saturday at Iowa. “Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China,” she was quoted by the Register in Des Moines as saying. “When that money comes due — and this isn’t racist — but it’ll be like slavery when that note is due.”

This was greeted with a flurry of snide comments, including the Reverend Al Sharpton of MSNBC, who suggested that Mrs. Palin was racist, despite her attempt to deflect criticism anticipating that charge and denying it in advance. The Daily Beast suggested the ex-governor “must not have seen ‘12 Years a Slave’ yet.” And there was a comment by a writer named Jenny Kutner, who reckons that Mrs. Palin seems to be “confused about United States history.”

Ms. Kutner’s piece caught our eye because it appeared at Salon.com, which as recently as January ran out a long dispatch under this headline: “Has America become a slave to its own debt?” The piece, by Steve Fraser, editor at large of New Labor Forum magazine, ran to more than 4,000 words. A subheadline summarized the piece this way: “ For a small minority, it’s a blessing; for others, a curse” and went on to refer to “Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship with debt.”

“Credit has come to function as a ‘plastic safety net’ in a world of job insecurity, declining state support, and slow-motion economic growth, especially among the elderly, young adults, and low-income families,” Mr. Fraser wrote. “More than half the pre-tax income of these three groups goes to servicing debt. Nowadays, however, the ‘company store’ is headquartered on Wall Street.”

“Debt,” he wrote, “is driving this system of auto-cannibalism which, by every measure of social wellbeing, is relentlessly turning a developed country into an underdeveloped one.” Mr. Fraser writes for a journal whose Web site is published by the City University of New York and which is billed as a place for labor and its allies to test and debate new ideas. He concluded by posing the question: “Is a political resistance to debt servitude once again imaginable?”

We happen to think it’s a good question and it strikes us that one person Mr. Fraser could talk to about it would be a certain ex-governor of Alaska. Mrs. Palin, after all, is one of the few governors of our time who is a card-carrying union member and who has seemed to appreciate the role that organized labor can play in our battle of ideas. Our guess is that he would find Mrs. Palin a lot smarter than the Left likes to picture her as being.