A Christian’s Heart 6-5-2012

America the Fool

The Tyranny of Good Intentions

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Matt 7:21-23)

[Jesus said,] “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matt 7:11)

We are a society that is being destroyed by “well intended” policies. The welfare state, which has destroyed millions of lives, especially in the black community, started based on good intentions. Lyndon Johnson introduced the 1964/65 Great Society legislation by saying it would be a help up, not a hand out. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28464#axzz1wx6DFZIw

But it has not turned out to be a help up at all, but just one hand out after another. Generations of people have grown up on welfare. Generations of lives have been destroyed thereby, especially in the black community. Giving people money without requiring that they earn it, destroys their willingness to work, and it sabotages their self-esteem. When one looses his/her self esteem, he/she feels victimized and he/she gets angry. So now, after 50 years of the destructive welfare policies we “naturally” live in a society full of anger and hate where everyone is a victim. This is especially true in the black community where victimhood is preached everyday.

Bill Clinton himself is quoted as saying,

“All Americans, without regard to party, know that our welfare system is broken, that it teaches the wrong values, rewards the wrong choices, hurts those it was meant to help,” Clinton said. “We also know that no one wants to change the current system in a good way more than people who are trapped in it.”

And any one of you can all look into your own souls and see that this would be true of you too, if you were (or are) unfortunate enough to be a client of (and a slave to) the welfare state.

Now, Scripture is clear: even though all of us are evil (absent the saving work of God’s Spirit in our lives) we can do good things as God would judge them. And certainly I believe the genesis of the welfare state was based on the good intention to help people in need. Who, after all, seeing someone starving would not want to give him/her food to eat? (Though I don’t believe any able-bodied person in the U.S. was starving in 1964.) Who, seeing someone going naked, would not want to give them clothing to wear? (Again, I don’t believe any able-bodied person was going naked in America in 1964.) Who, seeing someone struggling to support themselves in this dog-eat-dog society would not want to give him/her a helping hand to allow him/her to succeed? (This was certainly true of millions of people in America in 1964, especially in the black community.)

But my question is this: if after 50 years and $16 trillion dollars of not only failed welfare state policies but of the destruction they have caused, can one really claim to have good intentions by continuing to support and facilitate these destructive policies? Rather, can it be reasonably interpreted that those who continue to support these destructive policies don’t really care about the people they are supposedly trying to help? Can it not be reasonably inferred that they are really just flattering themselves and pumping up their own egos at the expense of those who are their true victims: the people enslaved by the welfare state, and the dependent mentality it fosters? Can it not be reasonably be inferred that these people in all reality need the poor and the destitute to remain poor and destitute so that they will have a constituency that will help them maintain their political power?

Recall when a massive change to the welfare program, called workfare, was passed in 1996 there were howls of protest from the Welfare State promulgators, that requiring people to actually work for their benefits would leave people starving in the streets; children would starve; whole families would starve, and all manner of cataclysmic evil would rain down on America. (Bill Clinton’s words above were stated in the context of this workfare reform effort and the debate that resulted.)

Needless to say, none of these catastrophes happened, and the worst fears of those who howled loudest did not materialize. The welfare roles were reduced dramatically and people whose families had been dependent on welfare for generations were finding work and breaking the chains that bound them without hope to dependence on welfare. Yet in the face of this, in 2009, a bill was introduced to reverse these beneficial changes. I cannot determine whether this bill was passed or not, but the very idea that it would have been introduced in the first place tells me that those who support the welfare state do not have the best interests of its slaves at heart. I believe the very introduction of this bill answers my question above: these politicians need the poor and destitute to remain poor and destitute so that they, the Welfare State supporters, will continue to control the destitute’s lives, keep them dependent, and thereby retain their power over them.

The passage from Matthew chapter 7 above states clearly that there will be those who might have thought they were doing good, but who in the end will be cast into the burning fires of hell because they were doing evil in God’s eyes. And certainly, the Welfare State has produced only evil in the lives it has destroyed. But this passage implies to me that there are many who are knowingly doing evil who will also be thrown into the burning fires of hell, though they claimed they were doing good.

God save America from the continued expansion of this evil program, and from our “good intentions”. If He does not, America will impale itself on them: anger and hate will continue to spread, and civil strife will break out; eventually society will destroy itself. We have already seen the beginnings of this in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I addressed in a previous blog. We can see this destructive pattern in other countries, like Greece.

But since we have rejected God as a nation, I hold out little hope that He will turn us from our destructive and evil ways.

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