Socialism Bromide #5 — So Since You’re Against Government Spending, What Would You Cut?
The response which those who believe in limited government often get from people who think that the Government should be redistributing wealth is, “What would you cut.” Sometimes such a question is better and more quickly answered by making a list of things one wouldn’t cut. The best and easiest answer though to such a question is to say, “I would cut all those programs not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution.”
People must keep in mind that whenever Government involves itself in wealth redistribution Government is involved in theft as they steal from Peter to give to Paul. As theft is sin, no Biblical Christian can support a Government that involves itself in confiscatory taxation to the end of massive wealth redistribution schemes.
In the words of Leornard Read, Government’s function,
should defend the lives and property of all citizens equally. This means protecting willing exchange and restraining unwilling exchange; suppressing and penalizing fraud, misrepresentation, predatory practice; invoking a common justice under written law; and keeping the records incidental to these functions. Governments legitimate purpose is to codify and then inhibit all destructive actions while leaving all creative and productive actions — including welfare, charity, security, and prosperity — to citizens acting voluntarily, privately, cooperatively, or competitively as they freely choose.”
When the government is in the business of seizing the assets of the citizenry government loses it’s status as legitimate because such a government at that point has gone from that institution which is responsible to insure proper boundaries for a vibrant market to being a institution that exists for its own end and to be enriched in that end with the private property of others. When Government tilts the balances of free exchange by putting its Leviathan thumb on the scales of exchange, Government thieves from some people (those they take from) not only their wealth but also thieves from other people (those they redistribute to) their sense of personal individual responsibility and so their dignity.
So, in embracing the philosophy of limited government I would cut all of those funds that work to keep the citizenry dependent upon the Federal Government as opposed to being dependent upon themselves as they look to God for His provision as they ply the trades, professions, and crafts to which God calls them.
Feminism
The chief results of the feminist movement has not been the independence, equality and flowering of women that was promised, but rather the result has been a savage dependence of the oppressed woman, as she becomes, in the New Feminist order, the slave in the workforce, the concubine of a barely known partner in the bedroom, and a stranger to her own children who are raised in some foreign commune by some statist Nanny. Feminism has hardened and embittered many a woman who were flowers which never bloomed because of the blight that is feminism. Feminism has held and abused women in these New Feminist order roles by the brute force of “glorious liberation” from the beneficent order of scriptural marriage.
Random Thoughts On Idolatry
“God has made humans to reflect Him, but if they do not commit themselves to Him, they will not reflect Him but something else in creation. At the core of our beings we are imaging creatures. It is not possible to be neutral on this issue: We either reflect the Creator or something in creation…. All humans have been created to be reflecting beings, and they will reflect whatever they are ultimately committed to, whether the true God or some other object in the created order…. We resemble what we revere, either for ruin or restoration.”
G. K. Beale
We Become What We Worship
“Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me”
God
Idolatry is a odd mechanism.
The above quote is true but it is only half true. The half that it leaves out is the fact that before fallen man can reflect his idols he must first make his idols and the idols he always makes are merely extensions of himself. The idols of fallen man are merely man said loudly. So, here you have fallen man who reifies and objectifies himself as a idol he has cast and then he turns right around and seeks to reflect himself in the very idol he has created. So, at the same time we can say that man is the creator of the idol, but also that the idol is the creator of man. So, in the end all idol worship, however grotesque, humorous, and lamentable, is in reality just varied forms of self worship.
The oddness in idolatry is compounded by the fact that man, the inveterate worshiper, seeks, in his modern installment, to outlaw or confine worship and religion. Modern man says he will outlaw all idols and idolatry and will once for all be done with such superstition. Yet the minute he seeks to cleanse the public square of all the Idols he finds himself enthroning a whore as the “Goddess of Reason,” in the Notre Dame Cathedral. August Comte spent his life seeking to abolish worship and religion and when he was finished he established a new religion and proposed a hierarchy with himself at the top of the food chain and the soul of his deceased mistress as a sort of Queen of Heaven, and not being satisfied with that he created a liturgical humanist calendar by which to mark days and seasons. The humanist eliminates idols and religions and replaces them with himself as the chief idol.
Every people who have refused to bow to God in every age has had their defacto idolatry dejour. The fact that idolatry has been seen universally where ever and when ever the God of the Bible is fore-sworn is indicative that of something intrinsic in human nature. Man will have his idols. There is no turning from God without a turning to an idol. As we have seen in the paragraph above, those who are the most adamantly materialistic are most hopelessly idolatrous. The more materialistic they are and the more they insist they have no gods the more it becomes evident that they are their own gods.
This proclivity towards reflecting our idols starts at a tender age, and is understood by the marketing gods of our times. When I was a child, little girls were given “Barbie dolls” and the hourglass, glamorous Barbie became for girls everywhere a kind of subtle idol through which their playtime formed in them a vision of the woman they were supposed to reflect. In light of the fact that we now have those who are fostering a idolatry where the boys and girls are encouraged to choose their own gender one kind of pines for the days when the subtle Barbie idols reinforced in girls that they were supposed to be female. The idols can always get more twisted.
As I studied my Church History I used to shake my head in amazement at the idols that previous cultures could create and reflect. How could any people turn the Saints into idols or worship and adore relics as idols? Yet, I find myself living now in a culture that gives that same fawning adoration to the celebrity and the “Star” as Idols, and we have placed our modern demigods in our own version of a liturgical calendar year that includes the Grammys, The Oscars, The Emmys and the Superbowl halftime show as our annual high Holy Feast Days. August Comte just lacked the pizzazz of the entertainer.
Civilizations and cultures past have always had their idols. We have reverted in our idolatry to the fertility cults of old. We worship the phallus and the sex act. Janet Jackson gives us a little breast action on one of our recent High Holy Day celebrations. The year following “Prince” gives us the outline of the penis in his Super Bowl performance. This year we got the “Material girl,” (how appropos that?) giving us the usual bumping and grinding with a little Masonic and Kabbalah symbolism thrown. The devotees of the idols loved it and the gods were pleased with the adoration.
Civilizations, in more refined times past have made heroes of Holy Man, or some have made idols of the Poet-Warrior. Our civilization has as our idol not only the sex crazed Onanist as seen in the barely dressed bumbers, and grinders that we see everywhere, but we also worship as idols the pretenders. We worship the celebrity, the actor, and the entertainer. Of course these people, in what they are worshiped for, are not real and so we worship the illusionists and so we as a people are illusory. Like what we worship there is no content to us, we have no moral gravitas (weightiness), and we are all personality and no character.
And the final insult is that we have brought all of this idolatry into our Churches. The Churches that pack them in specialize in the illusory and are staffed by professional celebrity illusionists. Like the Temple in Jeremiah’s time which was filled with every pagan idol imaginable, the contemporary Church has simply transferred the idolatry of our zeitgeist into the sanctuary. Worship is now showtime and the Pastor is Madonna.
The result of our idols is that we, as a people, when we are not about sex, have about us the same nothingness as a good illusion. We are not real. We are as substantive as mist, as interesting as water, and as boring as multiple reheated leftovers.
And we love it so.
The Bayly Brothers Are Indeed Out Of Their Minds
Tim Bayly,
Ron Paul is to national politics what R2K is to the salt and light of the Church. Both Paulites and R2Kites have never seen a battle they want to fight. So instead they come up with sophisticated reasons why Little Round Top is the wrong hill to defend and Colonel Chamberlain’s bayonet charge was over the top. The wrong man led the wrong troops in the wrong charge using the wrong weapons at the wrong time and the wrong location.
This has to be the most asinine thing I’ve read in a very long time. Bayly has found the Nirvana of perfect stupidity where sheer, utter lunacy is of such a high grade and refined variety that one can only weep at the site of purity of perfection. With the paragraph above the Baylys have gone from the stupidity inhabited by mere, though great demigods and have found lodging in the Inn of the sixth ignorance where demigods in stupidity are canonized as Sainted demigods in Stupidity.
But, these days that Inn is adding new wings daily because business is booming.
Ron Paul and Paulites have never seen a battle they want to fight?
Is Bayly unaware of Paul’s constant fight against the Federal Reserve? Has Tim never viewed the clips of Paul arguing with Ben Bernake or Alan Greenspan? What corner of the universe is Tim troglodyting in that he is unaware of Paul’s book, “End The Fed?”
Not only has Paul been fighting a epic battle he is fighting THE EPIC battle. Anybody who pretends to understand politics knows that money is the mother’s milk of politics. Because of the FED all of life and society has become political because it is all driven by large interests groups who are kept afloat, directly or indirectly by the FED. By Paul fighting the Money Interests he is fighting at the root all those battles that the Baylys are fighting at the periphery. Winning the fight against the FED would change EVERYTHING in this country from Abortion to the Homosexual Agenda to Mega-Churches. But the St. Baylys are too stupid to get this and so, in keeping with their approaching sainthood in Stupidity they hurl stupid charges at Paul and the Paulites that they don’t fight against anything.
Ron Paul and Paulites have never seen a battle they want to fight?
What about the Battle against Empire that all those who love Freedom fight? Ron Paul has his faults, to be sure, and I have chronicled them more than once on this site, but to suggest that his ongoing Battle against the Leviathan State has not been a battle just leaves the mundanely moronic with their jaws agape over the perfection of the moronic now dwelling in their midst. The Federal Government is a Behemoth that Paul and the Paulites want to slay and they are fighting to do so. The Federal Government continues to seek to accrue more and more power and sovereignty and Ron Paul has been fighting against that non-Constitutional and non-Biblical idea for decades.
St. Bayly continues with his tryst with irrationality,
In fact, watch these men closely and you find the only battle they’re willing to fight is the battle opposing battles. But of course, I use the words ‘battle’ and ‘fight’ quite loosely because both require courage. I don’t write this to demean them, but so readers will see the connection between their techniques, commitments, and character.
They’re the skinny boy in the corner of the schoolyard shouting “Nanny nanny boo-boo” at the real boys over on the baseball diamond trying to catch the ball, swing the bat, hit something, and run. Over in the corner of the playground with his back to the wall is R2K’s favorite cultural icon, Woody Allen, making jokes about how he refuses to play baseball because baseball is a stupid game with stupid rules played by stupid boys. But of course, he did try to play baseball once, and when the ball was flying toward his face, he misjudged where to put his mitt, he took his eye off the ball, and the ball hit him square in the face, and it really really hurt. He’s never forgotten it and now he makes fun of boys who play baseball.
All the boys who play baseball think he’s a coward, but he’s always surrounded by the other boys who got punched in the face with a baseball and decided never to play baseball again. They laugh at his jokes. Then there are the girls who never wanted to play baseball and don’t know a coward when they see one, and they think he’s kinda cute and sweet. They pity him for being an outcast and one day that pity will cause them to allow him to kiss them.
Here’s my modest proposal. Let the R2Kites go out and sidewalk counsel outside the abortuaries and write legislation against assisted suicide and lobby against the pornographers and run for appointment to the county planning commission and enlist in the Marines. You get the idea. Let’s see them do the good works they’re always arguing the church shouldn’t do because it’s not the right person at the right time in the right place with the right weapon. Then, when they’re awarded a Purple Heart for valor in battle, we may listen to them. But as long as they’re over in the corner of the playground making passive aggressive jokes and refusing to put a mitt on, let weaklings and girls pay attention to them.
Conceding that the squirrel Baylys do find a quality acorn occasionally here are two of the problems with the Baylys that explain how they can be right about bashing R2K but wrong about so much else.
1.) The Baylys are walking contradictions. On one hand they rightly rail against R2K but on the other hand they run theonomists and postmillennialists out of their congregations because the theonomists and postmillennialists take issue with amillennialism — the very foundation of the R2K they rail against. So, the Baylys are not systematic in their thinking and it shows (again) in articles like this one.
2.) The Baylys seemingly want the “ring of power.” I don’t want the damned thing. I want it cast into Mt. Doom. I want to see sphere sovereignty and subsidiarity re-established so that the power of the ring is no longer centralized. My issue with R2K is that R2K doesn’t believe that these different spheres can be Biblically governed and R2K believes that the Church, submitting to Scripture, should have no counsel in what these Biblically ordered spheres might look like. The Baylys issue with R2K seems to be that R2K is stopping them from grasping the ring of power. So while the Baylys and I might agree that R2K is horrendous theology, we are disagreeing with R2K for very different reasons. The fact that the Baylys can rail against Ron Paul and compare him to the Escondido boys is indicative of the Baylys discontent that Frodo Paul’s battle is to pull down Mordor on the Potomac. The Baylys don’t want to pull down Mordor on the Potomac, they just want to take it over and occupy it. The Baylys seem to think that all Mordor on the Potomac needs is just the right Captain to guide the ship of state.
Idiots.
The Baylys finish with a perfect pirouette of protracted puerility
Similarly, let Ron Paul stop running for national public office. That’s the wrong battle at the wrong time with the wrong weapons and the wrong man. The man who sits in the Oval Office needs to be a man who knows how to do and say something other than how very deeply he’s convinced that every battle is the wrong battle at the wrong place and wrong time fought by the wrong men with the wrong weapons holding those weapons in the wrong way. I mean, really! How can anyone not see what’s going on with this man?
He’s asked about things like sodomite marriage and murdering babies conceived through rape and the starvation of Terry Schiavo and all he can do is whine about how conflict is so very difficult and if we’d all learn to fight the way he does–ECPs and states rights and all that–the world would be a better place.
What can I say?
This is the kind of tripe you get from manly men who think Peggy Noonan is profound.
Paul’s position on abortion is wrong. Paul’s position on sodomites in the military is horrendous. Paul’s position on illegal immigration is disastrous but what people like the Baylys don’t get is that Paul’s intent to pull the foundations of Mordor on the Potomac down will change the whole landscape as it pertains to these issues. As we have had precious little success on these issues for 50 years with the current landscape it would seem that we would want to leave our insanity of doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results and vote for somebody who wants to give us a change of scenery.
Hat Tip to Darryl Hart for bringing my attention to this Bayly Babble.