“The greatest organized wrongs which the civilized world has seen perpetrated in modern times, upon the well-being of mankind, have been committed under the amiable name of humanity. No despotic government now avows the ruthless purpose of self-aggrandizement and of the gratification of hatred and the lust of power; but its pretense is always the good of society, and the welfare of the governed.”
R. L. Dabney
The Crimes of Philanthropy
Vol. IV — Secular Discussions — pg. 53
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.”
C. S. Lewis
God In The Dock
When any politician or bureaucrat promises that they are going to do something in order to help the citizenry at that moment the citizenry should remember all the past promises of politicians in history in order to lend help. The Bolsheviks promised to help the proletariat and 50 million dead proletariat members later they never did receive that help. The Black Republicans promised to help the black man and 150 years later some have argued that the average black man’s situation in 1862 was better than the average black man’s situation in 2012. Mao and the Communists promised to help China. 100 million dead Chinese don’t think too much of the help they received. Margaret Sanger, and her political water carriers, promised to help women and tens of millions of dead baby women later this doesn’t look much like help. In point of fact, it might be considered a good rule of thumb that whenever a politicians promises a program of “help,” the best action possible would be to vote against that “help,” if one values their lives.
The Roosevelt administration promised it was going to do good with the NRA but what happened instead was the federal government increased both the length and depth of the Great Depression. The Truman administration promised to help America by seizing ownership of American Steel companies in 1952 with the result that Truman almost had a National uprising on his hands because of his unconstitutional actions. Eisenhower promised good in operation keelhaul and millions of German POW’s died. Kennedy promised good to the anti-Castro Cubans and left them dying on the beech. Johnson promised good in the war against poverty, and poverty increased. Nixon promised good in price and wage controls and prices went up while wages remained stagnant. The Bush administration said it was going to do good with the “No Child Left Behind” Act and the result has been more children even more stupid then they were before children were left behind. The record could be piled up ad-nauseaum. The current administration in these united States says it is trying to help the American worker and the result is that the American worker can’t find work and does find that the creeping inflation is making him wish that he would quit being helped. The current administration said it was doing good by supporting the “Arab Spring,” in Muslim countries only to find that the Arab Spring, being taken over by the most extreme Muslim groups is in reality a “Arab Pestilence.” And now the Government wants to do good by providing contraceptives which I am confident will result in the “good” of mass sterilization.
Our Founding document understood all this and that is why it was a negative document restricting the “good” that Government could do by limiting it to very precise delegated and enumerated powers. The ratifiers of the Constitution understood that the best thing a Government could do was not do good beyond what it was specifically ordained to do.
We must cease looking to the Federal Government for good and strengthen ourselves, our families, our churches and our communities so that these subsidiary mediating institutions can once again be a means of how the God of the Bible does good to us. If the Federal Government continues to do good to us we will soon perish as a people.
