So now that I've put-off half of the people with whom I might otherwise have a conversation with, I'll get to an actual point I want to make about the situation our country (our world) is in.
How did we bring it to such a turn? For the nonce, let's say I don't believe, as some frighteningly credible persons these days believe, that Barack Hussein Obama really wants to destroy the United States or its Constitution. But the system of free enterprise wherein a man or woman can labor and get gain and control the disposition of that gain as he or she sees fit is under a serious assault. It's under assault mainly by conscientious people who see troubles in society and have become disenchanted by the apparent failure of the traditional system of solving these things, which is the Christian concept of taking care of your neighbors and succoring the poor. (In a "righteous" society "poor" means physically or mentally ill or disabled since everyone else can and will work to take care of their basic needs...which is all they expect.) In our society, we've slowly and disastrously hired our government to perform this Christian Service in our behalf. In doing so we've committed the grave error of hiding our faces from our own flesh. A term Isaiah used to describe the sin of selfishness (In Isaiah 58:7) Incidentally, he coined the phrase while he was reiterating the principles that surround the commandment to engage in religious fasts and in the same passage pointed out a perfect system for funding Christian largess to the poor which is the subject of the entire chapter of Isaiah 58.
Hiring the government to feed the poor for us was convenient. The poor are often kind of messy. Not just in the sense that they sometimes have dirty clothes and live in dirty surroundings. But some of them have dirty habits as well. They are uncomfortable to be around. They are inconvenient. They remind us of our own vulnerabilities and so it was easy to give up a little in the way of taxes and let the government hire an army of "experts" to take care of our duty for us.
Trouble was the government paid these people. And they paid their managers based on the size of the organizations they managed. Under such a system there were rewards in having a caseload too big to handle with the current staff. More people had to be hired. The boss got a raise. Corruption erupted. More oversight was demanded by the people. Congress demanded paperwork. Even more people were hired to handle that. With more staff to supervise, the boss got another raise. Instead of spending that raise, the boss used it to borrow money for a place in the mountains for weekends. Now his kid needs braces. He didn't consider that when he signed the note on the vacation place. His wife starts to complain that without braces, his daughter will not be ready to be chosen homecoming queen in five years. He needs more income. Fast. Suddenly a handout becomes an "entitlement". People who would ordinarily work themselves out of the system and become self-sustaining are convinced they will never be able to catch up with the Republican swells and that government is their only hope of an existence with a flat-panel TV. So the food stamps stay.
The children of the "entitled" grow up with the hand-out culture in their homes; thus securing the futures of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of government workers whose only purpose is to pass out entitlements to a population that will never be allowed the profound pleasure and satisfaction of sitting down monthly at the kitchen table and writing the check for the last of the bills. Checks adequately funded by the work of their own hands. To do so would render those sweet form-handling jobs with benefits and no chance of lay-offs or firings (except for the most egregious offences like work-place homicide. And even then, they get early retirement.)
Of course the entitled and the entitlers will vote for the politicians most likely to keep their respective gravy trains running and everyone but everyone in this perversely symbiotic fraud is kept happy; although two of the classes are mostly ignorant of the fact that they are being kept (happily) in thrall by the third.
There's another class necessary for this stinker of a system to operate: The tax-payers. They're the slaves of the operation. Luckily only a little over half of the American citizens pay taxes, but they get to work each year until late May before they get to keep any of their gain for themselves but to be fair, part of what they pay out comes back to them in the form of protections, services and infrastructure that is legitimately government's to provide.
If you followed the link and read Isaiah 58, you'll (probably) see what went wrong with the God-inspired system of government we were given but are in danger of losing completely. We hired people do charity for us. We hid from our beneficiaries. We paid others to help the poor and made their livelihood dependent upon having, and keeping the poor. When a hireling comes around with money that is an entitlement rather than charity, the incentive to fend for one's self is destroyed. People get comfortable with their cages just like animals in a zoo. When zoo animals reproduce and their offspring is raised never knowing freedom, that next generation loses the capacity to care for itself. Think I'm cruel comparing people with zoo animals? Let's go back to the Old Testament. Egypt. Children of Israel. Wilderness of Sinai. They were enslaved for generations and hated their lot. God, through Moses freed them and what did they do? Laid down to die in the desert. If if weren't for manna and the odd flock of partridges not a tenth of them would have survived. God wasn't so much punishing the Israelites when he let them wander for forty years as he was feeding a ruined generation while they lived out their natural lives and bore children in hardship and struggle who could then take advantage of a fruitful land and make something of themselves. Who's fault was this? The escapees from Egypt who suddenly found themselves having to feed themselves? Moses for leading them away from their safe (albeit low-salaried) government works jobs? Or Pharaoh's for enslaving them in the first place?
(Answer is C: Pharaoh's) It's wrong to enslave other people. And whether you do it maliciously in order to secure cheap labor to have your tomb built, or out of a mishandled compassion peppered with a desire to secure your own livelihood, the enslavement of people, physically or functionally, is just wrong.
People who love people don't do that to them.
It's also stupid. God makes a boatload of promises to people who take care of the poor. Most of the promises He makes are fulfilled in natural ways. Think of the economic activity that would result from 90 % of the career "entitlees" being employed in gainful work. Think of the additional boost to the economy if most of their "keepers" were employed in productive pursuits. Since wealth is not a fixed commodity but rather is constantly created as people produce and trade, think of the added wealth that would result in an economy that had most of it's citizens fully engaged in work they were talented at and passionate about. Would such an economy resemble the situation described in Isaiah 58: 10-14? What if our charity was centered in our neighborhoods and communities and was given and received with the intent to lift rather than keep? If the recipients of charity were able to see the faces of those who cared about them--people who lived and worked with them? Would our society look different than it does now? Would we be in this fix--about to lose our genius system of governance and economy?
We did this to ourselves when we outsourced our love.
It may be too late for the United States of America to catch the slide to socialism before we end up like Europe. Those countries are just now seeing the bottom coming up fast and some of them are yelling at us from across the pond "Are you people nuts?! What are you doing?!"
But here's a little spot of bright light I was introduced to from a blog I follow called Zen Habits. If you can't find any poor in your own neighborhood or even if you can and just want to spread the love a little farther after you've seen to your own, look at this opportunity.
To me, this is the right idea. (The URL on the screen is actually not to Kiva website but you can click this Kiva to go there.) Helping up instead of just helping out. If we can support enough entrepreneurs in emerging economies we increase the activity of the global...well just watch the video. This is a step in the right direction with no governments sticky hands all over it mucking up the water. We may be done here, but maybe Kenya can come to our rescue in a few years.
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