Kidogo's World
There really are only three views: law is either revealed from God, or the product of man's reason, or a gift from the state. The framers of American liberty had no doubt that our rights were a gift from God, and they accepted the admonition of the New Testament that the purpose of civil government is to be a ministry of justice and a terror to evil doers. That is the purpose of civil government.
Howard Phillips
ONE REASON our country became great is that it was founded on the right principles. First of all, in the states which came together to form a more perfect union, the British common law was the basis of the law system. And the common law was rooted in God's Word -- rooted in the Bible. There was no doubt of the fact that this was a Christian country based on a Christian law system. The laws of every state, while they reflected different denominational preferences, nevertheless were rooted in the Word of God. One of the reasons we have so many debates today about abortion, pornography, homosexuality and other things, is that we are really debating about the religion of the nation.
That doesn't mean that everyone has to have the same religion, but it does mean that people have to be agreed on what the law system of the country is. It can't be two things. There has to be one law system. In a pluralistic law system, laws would be in conflict. Either theft is wrong, or it isn't wrong. Either sodomy is wrong, or it isn't. Either abortion is wrong, or it isn't. If you look in any good dictionary you will discover that another word for religion is law, and another word for law is religion. And the argument today is whether the Christian law system which undergirds our country will be maintained or will be cast aside. The debate can be described in other terms by those who want to disguise its real meaning; but that, in fact, is the nature of the debate. One side will win and one side will lose.
Those who reject these premises of American liberty are trying to overturn them, and many of those who believe in the premises don't even know that there is a war going on. Those people have to wake up, or they are going to lose it -- we are going to lose it.
The framers who wrote the Declaration of Independence said, "We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights." There was no doubt in their mind that the rights we have are a gift from God. There are two other alternatives. Either the rights we have are certain, unalienable, and a gift from our Creator, or they are the product of man's reason, or they are a gift from the state.
People of the socialist persuasion believe that our rights are whatever the state says they are. The state can give and the state can take away.
Libertarians say our rights are a product of man's reason rather than from God's revelation.
There really are only three views: law is either revealed from God, or the product of man's reason, or a gift from the state. The framers of American liberty had no doubt that our rights were a gift from God and they accepted the admonition of the New Testament that the purpose of civil government is to be a ministry of justice and a terror to evil doers. That is the purpose of civil government. It is not the purpose of civil government to redistribute the wealth. It is not the legitimate purpose of civil government to interfere in areas in which it has no proper function.
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Forms of Government
Civil government is not the only form of government. The most important government we have is family government. Every family has a ministry of justice. Children, either by indifference or by action, learn what is right and what is wrong from their parents. There is a ministry of justice. In a good family if children do wrong they get spanked, they get told what is right. There is a ministry of education. Parents are indeed responsible for the way in which their children are raised up. There is a ministry or department of welfare, where family members in need are cared for. There is a ministry of health in a family. I'd much rather trust that ministry than any by Hillary Rodham Clinton or her husband. That ministry of health cares for members of the family.
We hear a lot about the separation of church and state. I'd be more interested in the separation of medicine from state, because healing does not come from bureaucrats and politicians. It comes from God. It is really important not to have bureaucrats in the middle of that function. It is most important that we defeat all forms of socialized medicine.
Of course there's another important ministry within a family. That's the ministry of transportation. Every mom is busy driving her kids around to this lesson, or that appointment, or that ball game. So you can see that the family is a unit of government.
A farm can be a unit of government. A church has governing responsibilities; a labor unionÉ, an academic institutionÉ. There are many, many governments. Civil government is just one of them. Civil government has no right to trespass on the legitimate functions of the other governing institutions of our society, and we have to be very careful to limit what civil government can do.
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General Welfare
The framers understood that, and in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, they carefully indicated what the Federal government should do and what it should not do. They wrote,
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity [even to our unborn posterity] do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States.Those were the explicit functions. By "promoting the general welfare" they didnŐt mean redistributing the wealth. They meant that the general welfare would be promoted rather than the welfare of special interests. They were guarding against the possibility that one state would be preferred to another. The purpose of the Federal government was to apply justice equally to all the states and to promote the general welfare of them all and not to give preference to any one state.
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Theft
The story is told of the tourist visiting our nation's capital, who is strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, admiring the view in front of the White House, when suddenly he is accosted by a well-dressed man in a three-piece suit who pokes a pistol in his ribs and urges poignantly, "Sir, I'm sorry to trouble you. I don't like this any more than you do, but I'm collecting funds for a very worthy homeless project here in Washington, D.C. We're short of funds, so I'm taking up a collection. That'11 be $100 please, or I'll blow your brains out."
Despite his declaration of charitable intent that person who thinks he is working for a good cause is a thief. He is also a fool, because if he moved a few blocks uptown to Capitol Hill, he could do the same thing by majority vote -- with a larger return -- and be called a Congressman.
The Bible commands: "Thou Shalt Not Steal." Theft is wrong -- even when it is achieved in elegant surroundings, during broad daylight, and by majority vote. Whenever government takes your money for a purpose beyond its legitimate functions it is guilty of theft just as you would be guilty of theft if you robbed a bank.
It is also important to remember that if it isn't in the Constitution the Federal Government does not have the authority to do it. Lest there be any doubt about that, when the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution of the United States, it was punctuated by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which made very clear that all powers not explicitly granted to the Federal government were reserved to the states or to the people of the United States. That was a very important principle, but unfortunately it is a principle which has been forgotten by many of our politicians, if not all of them.
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Wilson's Reconstitution
Step by step, the framers' original constitutional design has been altered. In this century alone, radical transformations have been made.
Woodrow Wilson came to the presidency in 1912, not so much to preside as to reconstitute.
Although he was not alone responsible, during Wilson's tenure, the income tax was introduced, paving the way for wholesale expropriations of our resources, invasions of our privacy, and restrictions on our liberty.
Similarly, the Federal Reserve system was established, giving powerful private individuals, beyond public scrutiny or electoral accountability, the authority to manipulate the value of our money without reference either to its intrinsic value, to the increase or decrease of residual assets, or even to productivity.
Under Wilson, we got for the first time an unconstitutional military conscription, which indentured our youth to fight and die in World War I -- not to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrection, or repel invasion, as Article I, Section 8, stipulates. It was patently unconstitutional. The case was brought before the Supreme Court and the court refused to hear it -- because they did not want to interfere with the political and economic powers that be. But it was unconstitutional.
In the aftermath, we almost got a League of Nations, which, had it succeeded, would have sped up the timetable for an evil "New World Order" by several decades.
We also got, under Mr. Wilson, a 17th Amendment which, by providing for the direct election of U.S. Senators, increased the power of Big Media and Big Money in our political campaigns, even as it undercut the intended role of the states in our federal system.
Every liberal President in this century has come to town with an agenda which has undercut the Constitution, altered our political arrangements, and diminished our liberty.
Unfortunately, even those Republican Presidents, who campaigned for office as conservatives, did little or nothing, once inaugurated, to reverse course or change direction. It's easy to conclude that every recent President -- in terms of departure from constitutional principles and expansion of federal power -- has been worse than his predecessor.
At the same time, too many of us have failed to hold our public officials and political leaders accountable.
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Our Responsibility
Many people despair of rescuing this country from the political abyss into which it has fallen. But we have no right to despair until we have used all the opportunities which God has given us to try to set things right by the peaceful means provided for by the Constitution of the United States. Until you are giving a preponderance of your time, a preponderance of your money, a preponderance of your reputation to rescuing this country, you can't say that you have the right to pull out and take up arms against the government, or possibly to withdraw and abstain from responsibility to the decisions made by your government. We have a responsibility to be the keepers of the gates.
We have the responsibility to supervise our employees in the government of the United States and to hold them accountable to right principles. If we fail to exercise our supervisory responsibilities, the blame for the problems in the government belongs to us as much as it does to the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Now that isn't to say that it is easy or even likely in human terms that we will prevail, but we do have an obligation to exhaust every possible way by peacefully using this political system to make it once again accountable to the Biblical premises and the constitutional boundaries which were bequeathed to us by the founders of our nation.
To continue: II Crisis in Accountability
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