Part of the reason that people vote for politicians who promise to expand the government is to solve cultural issues.
Many of the issues that the government has been expanded to solve have been created by the decline in morality.
If morality would not have declined, the government would not have needed to expand. But now we are in a dilemma as the deepening recession will eventually force a reduction in government. Without morality to fill its place, civil unrest is bound to follow.
Christianity teaches personal morality. Jesus taught us that each person is individually responsible for their actions and then commanded us to choose to love each other.
That foundation created a culture of self governed people who were motivated to love each other because it is pleasing to God.
As a result, crime is directly related to public morality. As the culture moved away from Christianity – as seen by the drop in percent of church goers and the removal of the Bible from public schools in 1963 - government expenses increase as jails fill up, more cops were added and more programs were needed to protect people from people.
The drop in morality has caused the government to expand in many directions over the last several decades.
Public Schools
Public school budgets have ballooned for many years, while the quality of education has decreased. Primarily because teachers spend a lot more time disciplining children, who have no moral understanding, rather than teaching them how to read and write.
Unlike parents, teachers lack the authority to discipline unruly students yet are supposed to teach them how to read and write. They should be allowed to first teach them why it is important to respect each other, from the foundation of Christian teaching.
This is what the public school system was originally designed to do. But the self-righteous have been successful at using the Legal system to remove Christian teaching from the schools. The result: today public schools are in chaos and the increasing financial burden is bankrupting the nation.
Jails
Jails have increased exponentially, burdening states with the expensive of feeding and clothing millions of people. A large portion of California’s budget increase over the last few years is due to their increase in the number of people in jails. Many other states have also had large increases in jail inmates.
This is also related to the many social programs created to address inequality. Without Christianity teaching people to help each other out of their abundance - greed, envy and selfishness has increased.
The solution has been to expand government with ‘wealth distribution’ programs like minimum wage, welfare and taxing the rich to force people to help each other. Minimum wage has eliminated a lot of low income jobs and training options for millions of workers, resulting in more crime and larger jails.
The governments' replacement of the self governance of Christian morality continues to fail and can be traced to the roots of the economic collapes.
As morality declines, the only solution that government leaders can seem to come up with is to expand the government even more. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are at the center of the economic meltdown and were created to solve the problem of inequality.
In a recent speech, President Obama said that he does not put his faith in religion or morality, but in the goodness of people. The problem is that there is no goodness in people, as the Bible teaches – all have gone astray.
Without addressing the decline of morality, the cost of government expansion to manage a growing immoral people will continue to increase. Europe is a prime example of how the plague of immorality leads to more and more government expansion and less and less economic growth.
Mark Steyn in his book, America Alone, points out that Europe will be bankrupt by 2020 because of its expansion of social programs. Europe is the most atheistic country in the world.
Foundation of America
The constitution of America was created for a moral people so that the government could remand limited and unburdening to the economy. The dominate economic leadership of America was built on a self governed moral people, with a limited government driven to understand God’s creation and his design patterns within nature to advance science and engineering.
This is what we need to return to and we have the history of this foundation to study as a model for economic recovery.
Here are several quotes from the creators of our nation, which say that without governing ourselves, the government is not adequate. The expansion of our government does not lead to more freedom, but to more slavery. Corruption will eventually set in and the expansion of powers will be used against the public much like a communist nation.
James Madison, the father of our constitution wrote,
“We have staked the whole future of America civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
Samuel Adams, another founding father of our nation said,
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Another founding father, Benjamin Rush said,
“By removing the Bible from schools we would be wasting so much time and money in punishing criminals. Take the Bible out of our schools and there would be an explosion in crime”.
America needs to return to its foundation of morality and replace the expansion of government with self-governing morality. We need to learn why it was so important for our fathers to put ‘In God We Trust’ on our money.