“You have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven…”
Daniel 5
Daniel Addressing Belshazzar
“But a free market economic system is a system. It is a public product, a creation of government. Any important structure of freedom is a structure, a complicated institutional and cultural context that government must nurture and sustain. Obviously, free speech is not free in the sense that it is free of prerequisites. It is not free of a complicated institutional frame. Free speech, as much as a highway system is something government must establish and maintain,” and so on and on.
A welfare state is certainly important to and probably indispensable to social cohesion and, hence, to national strength. A welfare state is implied by conservative rhetoric. A welfare state can be an embodiment of a wholesome ethic of common provision.”
George Will
In Defense of the Welfare State — 1983
1.) Note first that Will has always been cast by the Mainstream media as a Conservative. This reveals that 35 years ago Conservatism was a joke. How much more so now? Thoughtful Christians have to realize that in terms of the political spectrum in this country we have no dog in the fight. Our dog died in 1861.
2.) Note also that the free market is not only a creation of the (presumably Federal) Government, per Will, but the free market being the creation of the Government it is up to the Government to nurture and sustain this thing that the Government has created. The whole idea of Creation, Sustaining and Governing used to be ascribed, in systematic theology, to God’s providence. Will has replaced the Christian God with the state as God walking on the earth. The State is the creator, sustainer, and governor. Man is Plato’s political animal.
3.) If a free market economic system is a ‘creation of Government’ then how is it the case that it is ‘Free market?” If it is a creation of the Government then why not refer to it as the “Government market?”
4.) Will is presupposing the old fascist line of ‘everything inside the state, nothing outside the state.’ Will has posited that the State is the overall conditioning environment in which man lives, moves, breathes and has his being. Of course, the fascists got that idea from Hegel who got it from Aristotle and Plato. No Biblical Christian can abide this horse manure thinking from the “conservative” George Will.
Increasingly, one is hearing the modernist clergy bleat about how politics does not belong in the pulpit. This quote proves that the pulpit cannot help but be political. When our wisemen, politicians, talking heads, and cultural gatekeepers arise to denounce God’s sovereignty how can the pulpit not sing out in defiance of all such pagan thinking? For the pulpit to remain mute in light of the claim that the Government is God walking on the earth would be to abandon the calling to be salt and light, it would be to go all treasonous at the very moment when faithfulness is most desperately needed, as done on a large scale it would be the end of Institutional Biblical Christianity. The pulpit must be political because politics is increasingly seeking to muscle in on the bailiwick of the pulpit. Ministers who refuse to thwap pagan thinking upside the head when pagan thinking is seeking to mold the thinking of God’s people are either stupid or cowards.
Modern conservatism is just right-wing Hegelianism.
