God's Priorities for Government

Libertarians and some conservatives like to talk about “the proper function of government.” “Government exists to protect people from force and fraud, and that the rest of human activity should be done on a volunteer basis; i.e., by individuals, businesses, churches, and charitable organizations.” Under this view, the government should be mainly the military, the police, a few regulatory agencies and the courts. (Most conservatives, as well as moderate libertarians, would also throw in some of the “natural monopolies” such as road building.)

Interestingly, despite the fact that Fundamentalist Christianity is associated with the political Right, God’s priorities for government are just the opposite! If you look at the model government mandated in Exodus-Deuteronomy for the Hebrews to implement after the conquest of Canaan, you will find no king, president, legislature, standing army, or police force. The system more resembled the American Wild West than the government of any modern “civilized” country. There was no democratic legislature, for the law was fixed, but law enforcement was far more democratic than anything we would be comfortable with today. The military was simply the armed citizenry brought together by a prophet when the need arose – like some kind of extremist NRA fantasy.

Eventually, the people tired of the responsibility of self-governance and demanded a king. The Prophet Samuel’s reply to this demand is a libertarian classic – one which was later quoted in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense [1 Samuel 8:10-18].

But in the midst of all this borderline anarchy, there was a welfare system – one mandated by law! This is completely backwards from what most advocates of limited government consider to be the core “necessary” parts of government. It is for this reason that I put the Law of Moses in the upper left quadrant of the chart on the home page of www.holisticpolitics.org. (Exactly how high it belongs in the freedom direction depends on how much you value the freedom to worship idols and engage in homosexuality vs. how much you value low taxes, personal weapons ownership, and lack of government employees.)

That said, the welfare system that was called for in the Bible was radically different from either socialism or the governmental welfare systems of modern “capitalist” countries. The objections of the Right to the modern welfare state do have merit, but the Bible’s answer was not no welfare system, but a much different welfare system.

Objections to Welfare

Helping out the poor is a good thing. However, modern welfare systems do have serious problems that need to be addressed:

• Welfare targeted at just the truly needy encourages some able-bodied people to fake neediness, thus encouraging unproductive and immoral behavior. For example, aid to single mothers discourages marriage.
• Extreme welfare systems and socialist states put everyone on the dole for certain services, such as education and retirement savings (Social Security) in the U.S. and medicine in Western Europe. This “robs Peter to pay Peter.” The result is bureaucracy, inefficiency, and loss of personal choice.
• Transferring wealth from the wealthy to the poor often means taking capital from the productive and giving it to unproductive consumers. This pulls down the overall wealth level. If overdone, the loss in general wealth can nullify the benefits of wealth transfer and actually increase poverty. This is what happened in the communist countries.
• The high income taxes needed to pay for a modern welfare state are extremely expensive to assess, violate privacy, reduce incentives to be productive, and hurt small businesses.
• Forcibly taking from one group to give to another is theft. This would be obvious if it were done by a private group instead of the government. Imagine if the Salvation Army were to arm itself and use its might to collect from all wealthy people in order to accomplish its good deeds.

All these objections are valid. All of them are answered in God’s welfare system. The power of God’s system is often overlooked today, as it was implemented for an agrarian society of very little bureaucracy. I am not going to propose that our government adopt an identical system in the modern age; times have changed. I am suggesting that we can learn powerful underlying principles from the ancient model, principles that can be used in both public and private programs to help the poor while preserving liberty and prosperity.

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Copyright 2004, Carl S. Milsted, Jr. All rights reserved.