I recently preached a sermon on the subject of stealing in our church’s series on the Ten Commandments. And one of the points I made is that socialism is a form of theft.
I mentioned the ill-conceived slogan going around during the 1960s – ” property is theft.”
But the Bible says, “Thou shalt not steal.” Implied in that commandment is the sanctity of private property – I’m not allowed to simply take it because someone else owns it. And the Bible does not say, “Thou shalt not steal, unless thou art the government.”
Socialism is a form of governmental theft. The government has no money of its own. It simply forcibly takes from Citizen A and gives to Citizen B. But, of course, the one who benefits the most from this socialistic scheme is Citizen C, the government bureaucrat who administers the welfare state.
Some of the wealthiest counties in the entire nation are the bedroom communities in the greater Washington, D.C., area, where government workers live who administer all the many wealth transfer programs for our country.
To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on Paul’s vote.
The Bible teaches us to help the needy. That is all voluntary. That is the church’s job. When the government gets involved in the “charity business,” it is not only wasteful, it undermines the family, human dignity, and self-reliance.
It’s one thing to have a safety net for those who may fall through the cracks. It’s another thing to grow the size of the federal government and our national debt more and more with never-ending spending until one day, the whole thing explodes.
Meanwhile, we have leading Democrat presidential candidates who want to add more and more to our federal government spending. According to a Fox News poll, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders each have almost 20 percent support among Democrats as of August 21. That represents a lot of Americans apparently buying into a socialist-type message.
Senator Warren may chafe at one using the term “socialist” to describe her policies. But big government is big government by any other name. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson: Big government, small liberty.
One of Elizabeth Warren’s big promises is to forgive student loans. It’s tragic that so many young people have become so loaded with college debt. But these student loans are freely assumed debts. Why should everyone else be forced to pay for them?
What’s ironic about it is that many of these costly degrees really don’t confer much value in terms of gainful employment.
It reminds me of the joke about two women, who hadn’t seen each other in a while, who had an encounter at the supermarket. One woman asked the other about her three children. One son had become a poet and had just received his master’s degree in literature. The daughter just graduated from college with a degree in modern art. But the third son? She sheepishly shared, “Well, you know Freddy. Freddy is still Freddy. He wouldn’t go to college – he became a plumber instead. By the way, if it weren’t for him, we’d all be starving.”
Virginia Prodan, an international human rights attorney, grew up under Communist Romania. She strives to warn Americans to never go down the socialist path. She came to the U.S. during the Reagan years, essentially as a political refugee. She wrote a book about her miraculous escape from an assassination attempt in her book, Saving My Assassin. I have interviewed her on the radio a few times.
She told me, “Socialism is the government starting to lie to you about free things, and you believe them…then the government establishes socialism. It gains power and transforms into a communist [state].”
If you disagree with the government under such a scheme, she notes, they will “kill you and take your property.” In other words, socialism is the gateway to communism.
When I asked her about why socialism was so popular today among young people in America, she responded, “They have been deceived by the same lies my parents and relatives had been deceived by, so many years ago – lies that led Romania to be transformed from a free country to a repressive, socialist government.”
Prodan notes that, “Few Americans know, even those who are dream about socialism, that the socialist leader Vladimir Lenin declared that ‘Liberty is so precious that it must be carefully rationed to ordinary people.’ Ordinary people are you and me.”
How many times must humanity, including parts of America, go down the socialist path before we realize the emperor has no clothes? The government has no money trees. We should listen to survivors of socialism and communism, like Virginia Prodan, rather than politicians who are essentially trying to buy votes with taxpayers’ money.
© Jerry Newcombe
The views expressed by NorthWest Connection columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the NorthWest Connection, RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
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Show comments Hide comments[But these student loans are freely assumed debts. Why should everyone else be forced to pay for them? What’s ironic about it is that many of these costly degrees really don’t confer much value in terms of gainful employment.]
As a millennial who grew up working middle class, college was not an option so much as a requisite to any successful career. It was never enforced that the context of a 4-year degree mattered; just that I’d had the wherewithal to complete it. My undergrad was in film, but now I work in IT, and that success is largely due to luck of the evolutionary draw… not everyone can “learn on the fly” like I have done particularly in such a technical field. So in a sense I feel as though I was pre-destined for success no matter what direction I went.
That said, the mindset with which I entered college in the first place was deeply flawed. I would contest the notion that I “freely accepted” that debt when the only realistic alternative was to work my way up at my high school job at the local pizza place. I needed an experience to push me to the next level, and without the focus to seek an apprenticeship or the resources to travel, college was the next best option.
It’s this inevitable necessity for many that college institutions have come to poach upon. Costs have skyrocketed in recent decades with minimal growth in ROI. When I graduated in 2011, I felt like I’d been spit out in the middle of a field with no clear path forward. I’m lucky, I figured it out and made my way. But the people seeking student loan debt relief are not to be scoffed at because I can imagine what it must feel like to find yourself still in that field years later.
Relieving SL debt is not the only solution. The institutions need to be reigned in. Community colleges and trade schools have helped offer viable alternatives, but the resources are simply not there to fully emulate an engineering education at a four-year school, and the bounded curriculums mean that a student of art history is paying ostensibly the same as an engineering student for a degree that (often the student understands) will pay much less as a career. So sure, that debt is “freely assumed”, but who are we to deny someone their heartfelt passion? The world still needs art and scholarship, after all.
We’re looking for a reset button is all. We’re not (all) the anti-capitalist anarchists that conservatives make us out to be. We don’t want to purge all debt from the system (e.g. credit card debt IS freely assumed and should not be forgiven… but personal finance literacy should also be taught publicly from a younger age… I digress). We just want to reset the system to where it makes sense and design a better system going forward for future generations.
As I’ve lived the last few years student and credit card debt free, I have made it a point to donate time, money, and other resources to programs that empower those who are still “in the field”, helping foster a curious mind and push them in any direction that might get them to their next level. I would love to see change at a level outside the reach of my measly helping hand that would help prevent people from ever ending up “in the field” in the first place.
Not everyone can be a millionaire, and there will always be people who are poor. But debt looms differently than poverty, just outside your control. Let’s throw our country a freakin’ bone and help the ones who are trying make the most of their lives.