Here are a few random thoughts to follow up on yesterday’s post about Christians entangled in the sticky mass that we are pleased to call federal helps, aids, loans, seductions, boondoggles, and entitlements. As I said yesterday, there are qualifications that can and should be made on this — it is a complicated subject — but I am convinced that we rush to offer those qualifications far too readily, and we routinely violate the principle that “difficult cases make bad law.” So there will be some qualifications in this post, but not as many as I think some would like.
First, I would like to reiterate what I said the outcome of this compromise actually is. I did not say that Christians who sign up for Medicare should be excommunicated or shunned. I did not say that they should be flogged. I said that entangled Christians are not and will not be in the vanguard of reformation. And that is nothing other than a simple observation that should be filed under gospel truth. Slaves who understand themselves to be slaves are pitiable. But slaves who think they are part of a “new way to freedom” don’t understand the world they live in. Someone with a Ron Paul bumpersticker parked outside the Medicare office is risible.
Second, I thought of filing this post under “Retractions” instead of “Obama Nation” because of something I have overlooked in I have said or written about a portion of this on some earlier occasions, and which was very similar to what one commenter posted — which is, “I am only going to take out what they made me pay in.” But here is an argument against that angle.
The Social Security Administration is kind enough to mail me periodic statements about how much money they have extracted from me over the years. I have thought before that there would be no problem, when I become eligible for Social Security, in taking payments until that amount were reached, plus twenty percent for restitution, and to tear up the checks thereafter. But here is the flaw in that, as I see it now.
If an officious neighbor named Smith thought that I was not to be relied upon to save for my retirement, and he came over with a gun every month and successfully took yet another “contribution” from me, promising to return it to me starting when I was 65, why would I refuse to take it when he started mailing it back to me? I know, it would be irritating in that he wasn’t acknowledging he had done anything bad, but still . . . why wouldn’t I take the money?
Well, I would take it, on the supposition that he had taken my money, put it gilt-edged securities, earned a tidy profit on it, and was now returning it to me. But you don’t know Smith. He didn’t do that. What he actually did was go on a bender every weekend, and he pretty much peed all that money down various gutters around town. And when he shows up again with a willingness to repay me, it will not be with the money he took from me. He doesn’t have any of that. But he still has his gun, and he is going to go get my repayment from another, younger, more squeezable sap than I now am. Not only so, but the nature of this robbery is such that the burden on those paying into the system ten and twenty years from now will be much more grievous than what I had to put up with — and what I have had to put up with has been pretty obnoxious.
So, if the government shows back up with your money, go ahead and take it back. But if they have to knock over a few more gas stations, shooting the occasional attendant, in order to fund their collapsing Ponzi scheme, taking that money really is problematic. Suppose, just suppose, that when it comes to the month before you are going to begin receiving checks, the president announces that he is going to save the faltering Social Security system by printing up a bazillion new dollars. That lunacy is going to land on people, and it will be more than a couple of gas station attendants. The genius of Ponzi schemes is that it pits the early victims against the later victims, instead of pitting all victims against the criminal.
Third, someone asked what difference is makes whether we participate or not. Well, in one sense it does not matter — but only in the sense that no one raindrop believes that it is responsible for the flood. Each individual’s part is miniscule, and if only one or two people change, that won’t change anything. But what we want is reformation of the Church, and we want God to see us repenting, and extricating ourselves as best we can. Perhaps God will show mercy. But if we are just going along to get along, and as we go we are developing perichoretic justifications for the welfare state, then we deserve what we are going to get, good and hard.
Fourth, the entitlement mentality is pernicious, and it really does get into everything. That entitlement mentality is now increasingly common, even among Christians, and even among Christians who take it on reluctantly. When someone says that they simply cannot afford to have a child with medical costs the way they are, then why don’t we respond with, “Well, don’t have a child then”? That makes everybody go yikes! and they immediately say that they have scruples about the use of birth control. Okay, I’ll bite. It sounds like you can’t afford to get married then. It’s lawful to not have children if you’re not married, right? But . . . but . . . we want all the privileges of marriage, plus the privilege of our convictions about birth control, and we want someone else to pay for a chunk of it. Now, please note — I am not saying this as big fan of birth control, as anyone who has read much of what I have written and taught about marriage and family can attest. But let me put it bluntly because we need to regain a sense of perspective. In my Bible, a prohibition of birth control is not found in the Ten Commandments, and a prohibition of stealing can be found there. We in the Church have developed ourselves some seriously dyslexic scruples. The use of birth control is the gnat. Feeding, clothing, sheltering, and educating the children you bring into the world is the camel.
Fifth, I acknowledge that we need hospital reform, tort reform, insurance reform, entitlement reform, across the board. We need one kind in the medical establishment, and we need another kind in the deep weeds of alternative medicine. I am not defending any particular institution here as is. In my view, the AMA has better ideas on how to safely deliver a baby than someone who has only gotten to Lesson 3 in her midwifery correspondence course. But before you rush to the keyboard, at least the midwives know that you’re not supposed to kill babies on purpose, contrary to the stated opinions of the AMA. Christians may be forgiven for looking sideways at hospitals where the baby murders are conducted on the fifth floor, and the high tech help for your baby (should you choose that) is found on the fourth floor. Make sure you hit the right button in the elevator. But the superiority of scientific medicine (when it is not being evil, as it frequently is) is simply my opinion — for a vindiction of that opinion, we would need an unregulated insurance industry. Which we don’t have — that’s one of the reforms we are still waiting for.
And last, I want to emphasize again the distinction between absolute poverty and relative poverty. It is illegitimate to cite verses like James 2:14-16 with the full emotional amperage, and then apply it to someone who had his application for subsidized housing turned down. Not getting your student loan is not the same as being destitute. If James were given a tour of a typical house as found among the American poor, the word he would use to describe it would not be “destitute.” There needs to be much more development of this issue, which I hope to do soon.