Have we made government into God?

Other peoples have paid the price of government-worship more visibly and summarily than we have. But the monstrous debt staring down the world’s advanced nations is part of the price we are paying, and it is an inevitable result of our decision to give over so much of our lives to secular, material collectivism. Collectivist schemes produce only debt, resentment, discouragement, and want because they put humans and human ideas in the place of God.

God can use us to create jobs, but we cannot use each other for that purpose. God can use us to rescue our fellow men from distress and despair, but we cannot use each other to do that. God can redress injustice when it is done to us; sometimes He even prevents it before it happens. But we cannot order and control each other to avert all possible forms of injustice. Nor do we exert any control over earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, the energy of the sun, the orbit of the moon, the path of the Milky Way through the cosmos, or the development of living species on earth. Indeed, what we understand about these phenomena is still far outstripped by what we cannot even usefully observe or identify.

The natural outcome of believing we can guarantee things that only God has control over is, precisely, the “unsustainability” we all talk about today in relation to government activism. When we take it on ourselves to guarantee results, we begin writing check after check we have no way of cashing. Many a burned-out boss and harried parent has learned the hard way that he or she literally cannot foresee, manage, direct, control, avert, prohibit, or guarantee everything related to a work place or a family’s life. Once other humans—and the vicissitudes of nature—enter the picture, there is much we simply do not control.