Charity as Practiced by Government:
Transfer of Power from You to IT!
I have been reading, The Welfare of Nations (James Bartholomew. 2016. Cato.) as he discusses the various aspects of welfare from an international perspective. Though he does not espouse a Christian perspective, his inclusion of data from multiple sources around the globe lead to one inescapable conclusion:
Welfare is NOT about helping people; welfare is about government helping itself at the expense of the people.
Government has had ONE goal since its inception by Cain: Replacement of God by Government (Ge 4:16-22). This was clearly attempted at the Tower of Babel and nearly succeeded except for the direct intervention of God (Ge 11:1-9). The history of the Old Testament was God’s perspective of man’s attempts to replace God with various governments to suppress not only the truth of God but also His offer of salvation based not on works but on faith in Christ’s finished work at Calvary. Since government determines “right and wrong” via laws it defines morality based on its particular set of beliefs which forms its religion for transmission to its citizens. This continues into our present time.
The modern nation-state has also sought to provide more power for itself through a variety of mechanisms. When war became too costly, in lives and materials, new techniques were developed based on terminology. This was no more prevalent than in America. The progressive period was the beginning of the transfer of power through the charade of charity; or welfare as we call the process today.
The Use of Deceptive Titles Used this Truism
Public education was developed and refined in Prussia as it sought to provide itself with both a compliant workforce and an efficient military. Prussia became so successful that America copied its methods in both theaters. The idea of free public education was not to remove inequality based on income but to provide its population with a basic set of skills as it entered the industrial age. No longer could uneducated people provide for the needs of the state via crops and basic industries as Cain’s descendants developed in Genesis chapter four. Industries required more than muscle, they required people with a basic set of skills in order to acquire the training necessary to develop and products, especially armaments. John Locke taught that children were “blank tablets” that could be imprinted as needed. As this field developed there quickly arose the doctrine that parents were not only useless in education but detrimental to the goals of education.
Welfare in the form of income and food support began as a function of the family, and if there were no family, the church. This system functioned very well at the local level. People knew each other very well and would support those considered “deserving” for short terms while shunning those who could work but would not for whatever reason. The public began clamoring for additional governmental assistance during the Progressive Era which rose to a crescendo during the Great Depression. President Hoover instituted some governmental assistance but considered invasive assistance at the federal level against the Constitution. His successor, President Roosevelt had no such qualms. Though many of his early programs were declared unconstitutional, his threat to reorganize the Supreme Court worked so that no other programs were overturned. This resulted in the largest peaceful growth of the federal government the world had ever witnessed. It did not alleviate the depression but actually made it much worse and far longer. However, under the guise of helping the poor and needy the federal government grew by leaps and bounds with the consent of the people. Now the people looked to the government to meet their needs rather than God. Government would supply their needs when God was “too busy elsewhere” to care for them.
There also developed a culture that resulted in the Great Society in the 1960s, a series of programs that promised to destroy poverty in America but in fact did nothing to alleviate poverty while it obtained the votes of all who enjoyed being on the government dole. Housing projects were developed to house those considered too poor to afford housing, especially in urban areas. However, the development of such projects were always more expensive than anticipated and poorly maintained. Since people who lived in such projects could not work without losing their benefits it also promoted an ethnic of laziness. In addition, it attacked the family structure since husband-wife families would receive fewer funds than female single-parent “families”. Children grew up without adequate male guidance promoting juvenile crime that feed into the spectacular crime sprees of the 20th century including “organized crime”. The more the government spent on poverty programs, the more pronounced its failure. However, since people maintained on these programs did not want to lose their benefits, they consistently voted for those who would maintain or increase their benefits. This decreased the power of the citizen while increasing the power of the state. The destruction of the nuclear family left the government as the surrogate parent and husband increasing its power exponentially.
This was augmented by the Feminist Movement which had been fermenting since the beginning of the Progressive Era. With the ability to tax its citizens based on rates of its choosing, the federal government needed more people in the workplace. With nearly half of its adult citizens at home raising families the federal government began to promote woman’s liberation movements. Women proved their worth in industries during both World Wars and with the increasing need for funds due to its War on Poverty, the federal government needed all adults earning wages so it could obtain the funds it needed from the taxing of women in the workplace. Under the guise of promoting “freedom” various groups agitated for “equal rights and freedoms” for women. It sounded good on the surface but the reality is that women would be moved from the house with relatively unstructured time schedules to work environments with strictly controlled time schedules. With the development of “day care” the last bastion of parental value training was eliminated as non-parents, guided by the state, would instill those values promoted by the state for the state.
One of the great tragedies of this transition was the turning of woman’s maternal instincts for their children against children! Women became the largest single group agitating for abortions which is simply nothing more than the murder of unwanted people. Though this has been practiced by many cultures in various forms throughout man’s history, the Christian culture had promoted marriage and families to protect children. Orphanages were developed to care for unwanted or parentless children rather than leave them to die on the streets. Abortions were seen as a means to eliminate unwanted children but dying is dying regardless of the age of the person. This, coupled with birth control pills, promoted sex without responsibility to produce the greatest spat of murders in history. Actually, this gave the state even greater power. If women wanted the “right” to abort children they had to support the state’s agenda which also included packages of benefits for women, even those who chose to keep their children for additional funds. Children became nothing more than crops in order to increase one’s “slice of the benefit pie”.
When Christ fed the 5,000 one day and refused to do the same the next day, He gave man a great lesson (Jo 6). He fed the people as much as they could eat because they came to hear the truth of the Gospel – He met their needs. The next day they followed Him, not to hear the truth, but to be fed again. Jesus could have obtained all the power He needed for earthly rule at the expense of the people but this would have robbed them of salvation. Christians should follow the same path. We give to those who have physical needs while teaching them the truth of the Gospel message of salvation in Christ. Those who do not wish to receive this message are not compelled to stay. Everyone who seeks to meet only the needs of the flesh without expending any effort on their own behalf will become slaves of the state. I have no wish to encourage people to be slaves to any government. I have been poor and used some of the available means to obtain education in order to stay relatively independent and provide for my family. This is the antithesis of the aims of the government.
Now that the nation-state is reaching its eclipse, the movement toward globalization is picking up the same banner. Globalization seeks to provide what it teaches people they need in order to obtain from them the power of consent to further its control over them. This has begun as regionalization. But as people become ever more enslaved to governments the more violent people have become. The truth of the gospel held human nature in check with its violence; however, now that people have wholesale rejected the morays of the Scripture, the human nature has been unleashed producing more violence that calls for even greater government control. We do not enjoy greater freedom today, we suffer under greater slavery that masquerades as choice, democracy.