Of God and Government

The folks over at QandO are giving John Kerry a justified drubbing over this comment:

I will tell you, nowhere in there, nowhere, not in one page, not in one phrase uttered and reported by the Lord Jesus Christ, can you find anything that suggests that there is a virtue in cutting children from Medicaid and taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.

This may remind us of Hillary's recent comments. I think most biblically informed readers are probably started shaking their heads as soon as they heard Kerry's name.

Paul Smith tackled this issue a while back. I meant to write about it then, but I never got around to it. That happens a lot for me.

My problem with the left is the problem I share with most socialist and communist systems: idolatry. Ultimately we are not supposed to justify our spending or property ownership to the government. The government doesn't own this land. Ultimately we are to justify our use of resources to the God who gave us those resources in the first place.

Liberals like to pretend that there is great virtue in redistributing wealth. There is none. There is no virtue for the rich, because they are not doing the right thing for the right reason. There is no virtue for the redistributor, because they are committing little more than state-sanctioned theft. There is no virtue for the poor because they are beneficiaries of immorality and that money often becomes a covetous entitlement.

For that matter, liberals like to treat poverty as if it creates some level of moral superiority over wealth. It does not. The bible exhorts people to do several things: be good stewards, use wealth to remove worldly concerns, live simply so that they can meet the needs of others more easily. While living simply may look like poverty, it is not. The difference is that people choosing to live simply and unhindered by possessions are doing it by choice. If you are poor because you do not know how to make, save, or spend money then you have no moral high ground.

This does not mean wealthy people are better than poor people. It means that there is no intrinsic morality to money or the lack of money. The morality of money is what you choose to do with it.

End unfocused rant.