Virtue of Selfishness - Individualism  

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  Date / Time: 12/14/2008 9:32 AM UTC

  The Nature of Government
  

  " A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.
  Do men need such an institution -- and why?" Ayn Rand The Virtue of Selfishness
  
  I'm not a Bible scholar, but remember in Samuel how the people of Israel had decided that they must have a king. The logic behind their decision was: "All our neighbors have kings." Never mind that God had been their King all along, but God didn't say no, and he called on Samuel to annoint Saul for the people insist on having a king.
  
  Samuel, and every prophet who came after him, held a very low opinion of human kings. Samuel resisted the very idea on the ground that the people of God were under the care and keeping of their heavenly king. Their king was the God who had created them, the God who had set them apart to be the People of God. A human king would be redundant. Copyright © 2008 The Episcopal Church - Sermons that work
  
  But, in the end, the people prevailed. Samuel anointed a man named Saul whom the people chose to lead them. Samuel had been told by God to choose Saul, but Samuel had them cast lots anyway, believing that God would sovereignly control the lot. The lot finally fell on Saul. Saul's first qualification from the voters' perspective was that he was tall; he stood head and shoulders taller than everyone else, he had been successful in battle. No mention was made of his governing skills, except by Samuel; and no one was listening to Samuel. Saul was, quite simply, the man of the moment.
  
  Yet in a few years he had lost his contact with God, lost the anointing of the Spirit, lost his humility, lost his character, lost his kingdom and lost everything. We can follow all the human kings, some good, some great, some with tragic results. The folly of man being governed by man however, is still with us today, and I'm not suggesting we could live well without government.
  
  I'm not an anarchist suggesting we try to rule ourselves and expect that everyone will just stay out of each others way. No, we are social creatures who benefit by living in cooperation with one another, and in a world of irrational and godless men, we may be wise to rely not only on our "man of the moment", but on our God and King.
  
  Our founding fathers were not anarchists either. They were however, revolutionary traitors to a government that sought to control the people of the land, not only in social matters, but in their private and religious matters as well. The first settlers weren't revolutionaries. Remember, they came to put some distance between themselves and their Government. The new world offered space to create new societies in which they could worship without interference—like the Pilgrims and Puritans who founded New England.
  
  Some who were considered troublemakers and radicals in their homelands, like the liberals fleeing the failed European revolutions of 1848, America offered the opportunity to make a new life in a land that valued liberty. To others, like Cuban revolutionary José Martí, the United States provided a temporary refuge while they worked to free their homelands from colonial rule or tyrannical governments. Source: Destination America by Charles A. Wills
  
  The point is we are a country that was built on the promise, on the dream, on the hope that we are a people who control our own government, and our government was designed to serve the people. Not to feed them and clothe them and tell them how to live their lives. Not to protect them from themselves or tax them out of fairness [welfare] or punishment [vice tax]. Taxes should be collected only to fund the basics of the government and the areas that we've contracted the government to handle, like a standing army and safe air traffic.
  
  I fear very much that we as a nation, as a people have allowed the government to become something of a behemoth that needs to be restricted and tamed back into submission.
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  • Ayn Rand
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