Lux Lucet

This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you:  He will take your sons…He will take your daughters…He will take the best of your fields…and give them to his servants…he will take your male servants…He will take a tenth of your sheep.  And you will be his servants.  And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the LORD will not hear you in that day.  – I Samuel 8:10-18

There are two major theoretical errors in the field of politics: 1) the belief that the individual is sovereign, and 2) the belief that the state is sovereign.  The former tends to anarchy, the latter to tyranny.  Both are best avoided.  But how?  The short answer is understanding this truth:  God alone is sovereign.  And if God is sovereign, man – considered either as private citizen or as magistrate – is not. 

The nation of Israel forgot this when they demanded Samuel make them a king.  They didn’t want the limited government of the judges.  The wanted a Führer who could make the trains run on time.  Samuel argued and told them told them what a king would do:  he would take their sons, their daughters, their fields and their vineyards.  He would take their servants both male and female.  He would take their harvest and the livestock.  He would take, he would take, he would take.  And what he didn’t take to keep for himself, he would give away to his rich, well-connected buddies.  Think of it as the OT version of crony capitalism, which isn’t capitalism at all, or the obnoxious “too big to fail doctrine” so popular in 2008.  But the people were not dissuaded from their chosen course.  They demanded a king and they got one…good and hard.

Americans too have ignored Samuel’s warning.  For what the prophet said about the behavior of a king also applies to big government in general.  After making a good beginning as a constitutional republic, our nation has morphed into a corporatist welfare state with government taking our freedom, our dignity and our wealth.  And much of what it takes is transferred to programs favored by special interest groups.    

One of the most powerful of those special interests is the lobby that seeks to perpetuate the Social Security status quo.  The program was an enormous fraud from the beginning, is currently going bankrupt, and will leave millions such as myself with nothing to show for a lifetime of paying FICA taxes…excuse me…contributions other than the a shrug of Uncle Sam’s shoulders.  One of the few men in Washington honest enough to speak the truth about the Social Security mess is Ron Paul.  In his latest Texas Straight Talk column Paul comments,

Courage begins with a commitment to see things as they are, rather than how we wish they were.  When it comes to Social Security, we must understand that the system does not represent an old age pension, an “insurance” program, or even a forced savings program.  It simply represents an enormous transfer payment, with younger workers paying taxes to fund benefits.  There is no Social Security trust fund, and you don’t have an “account.”  Whether you win or lose the Social Security lottery is a function of when you happened to be born and how long you live to collect benefits.  Of course young people today have every reason to believe they will never collect those benefits.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans that the job of the government is to praise good and punish evil.  Absent from his abbreviated list of proper government functions is retirement savings provider.  Big government is both a sin and a punishment.  It is a sin in that it is a rejection of God’s provision in favor of faith in the wisdom of men; it is a punishment in that it robs the offending people of their wealth, their freedom and their dignity.  And until Americans realize that the government – federal, state and local -is not the sovereign provider of all good things, they will continue to be hoodwinked by socialists who promise the world but deliver only bankruptcy and tyranny.  Read the rest of Paul’s article.