AN ODD POST FOR FATHER’S DAY: WHY THE GOVERNMENT CANNOT REPLACE DADDY

It is a fact that men and women are different. The heart of a man can be very hard. It takes a woman to soften it. The heart of a woman? Well, we know how a child can soften it.

Perhaps we just have a harder hearts, but for some reason I think men find it easier to accept the fact politicians will not spend our money the way we think they ought to do so. Politicians are just ordinary men and women and more ambitious than most. The majority of them will look out for what they perceive as their own interests before they look out for the people’s interests. That is just the way of human beings.

You want to make a machine work? Grow crops? Run an organization? Then you have to accept the fact that certain causes will produce certain effects, that the system characteristics of a machine, plant, or organization are what they are. We cannot change a system just by wishing it was otherwise.

Systems work as they work, not the way we want them to work. To understand how systems work, we must use plain language and define our terms carefully. Emotionally charged words may be suitable for deciding our goals, but they do not help us achieve our goals. Consider that the command to love God above all else and to love our neighbor as we love our selves is quite emotional. And why should we obey? Because God is our Creator. He created us to love Him and each other, and He loved us first.

Yet how do we obey God? First we must clearly understand what He wants of us. To do that we must humble ourselves. As best we can we must each set aside what we want and consider the world — all of Creation — from God’s point-of-view.

The governments we create are just small subsystems. Each government is just a subsystem within a larger subsystem. That larger subsystem we call a society.

Why doesn’t government work well? Why is it important to constrain the size of government and the powers of government leaders?

1. Human nature dictates that if a society wants to see its money well spent upon the needs of the people, then the government should see to it that the majority of wealth is retained by the people who earned that wealth. When politicians spend our money, they are spending someone else’s money on someone else. That is a situation ripe for fraud, waste and abuse. Hence, before we allow politicians to tax us, we must determine that the need is an unavoidable moral necessity.
2. Economic analysis has demonstrated how the supply/demand model leads to an efficient distribution of scarce resources. When people put their own money where their mouth is, we know their desire for what they purchase is more about need than want. On the other hand, the taxation/spending model has more to do with who screams the loudest. Have you have ever sat for hours week after week in traffic jams? Such daily traffic jams primarily result because politicians can just take our money and spend it to buy votes. So commuters have to scream bloody murder for increases in traffic capacity. Since we don’t pay user fees for using the roads, we have completely broken the supply/demand model. Therefore, we cannot simply offer to pay for what we need. Thus, economic analyses dictate that we should each pay for the government services we use when we use them and only when we use them.
3. Management theory has repeatedly shown the wisdom of delegating authority to the lowest level possible. Yet every time we put Washington DC in charge, we risk violating that rule. Even on their best day, politicians in DC cannot understand the needs of that elderly lady down the street. Moreover, that is not the problem a politician HAS TO SOLVE. To get elected and reelected, politicians must use our money to buy our votes, and we are not honest. Most of us are quite happy to see “other people’s money” spent upon our wants. Therefore, when we give government authority it should not have and cannot properly exercise anyway, we do more harm than good.

With respect to most families, at least those that still look like traditional families, fathers serve as providers and protectors. Mothers look after the children and the home. Men go out of the home, work, and bring home what is needed for food, clothing, and shelter. Men have to know how the world works, and we have to teach this to our families. Otherwise, we leave the people closest to us naive and susceptible to con-artists. And what is the biggest con? We each need to look carefully at our tax bills. How much of that money was well spent? When we voted, did we obey our Lord? When we last voted, did we vote for the welfare of our families, friends, and neighbors, or did we vote out of self-interest?