Laws for the sake of laws
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Another political entry coming up. I’m trying to cut back, but then I happened on this article by Dennis Prager this morning, and it was too good not to pass along:
Of all the myths that surround Left-Right differences, one of the greatest is that the Left values liberty more than the Right. Regarding a small handful of behaviors — abortion is the best example — this is true. But overwhelmingly, the further left one goes on the political spectrum, the greater the advocacy of more state control of people’s lives. …
By definition, the moment one crosses from center to left, one accepts more government control of people’s lives. Therefore, the further left society moves, the more there is government control over its citizens’ lives. It is astonishing that this obvious fact is not universally acknowledged and that the Left has somehow successfully portrayed itself as preoccupied with personal liberty with regard to anything except sexual behavior and abortion. …
… The single greatest example is law. The means by which the state exerts control over the individual is law. As with taxes, the more laws, the less individual liberty. And just as rational people acknowledge the need for taxation, all rational people appreciate society’s need for laws. But just as taxes increase the further left one moves, so, too, the number of laws passed increases.
As liberalism has moved left in the past 50 years, there has been a veritable explosion of legislation. That is why the mainstream, i.e., liberal, news media, characterize local, state and federal legislatures as successes or failures based on the number of laws the legislature has passed. The worst legislature is one that repeals laws, and the next to worst is a “do-nothing” Congress or state legislature, in other words, one that has not passed enough new laws. …
Prager goes on to give three reasons for the Left’s tendency toward more and more laws, but the last one I found particularly interesting:
The more secular the society, the more laws are needed to keep people in check. When more people feel accountable to God and moral religion, fewer laws need to be passed. But as religion fades, something must step into the moral vacuum it leaves, and laws compelling good behavior result.
And that’s the way it is now. In the pursuit of an elusive egalitarian state where no one is any poorer, sadder, stupider or less privileged than anyone else, we’ve gone into a perpetual cycle of litigation and legislation; in the pursuit of Total Fairness, we’ve created state-mandated unfairness.
But it’s not the unfairness that worries me. It’s that once again, a secular worldview is re-creating the mistakes of every bygone Enlightenment-based social and political philosophy: not taking man’s fallenness into account. (And by the way, that’s my biggest problem with both socialism and libertarianism.) I can imagine that at the end of humanity, the most godless humans alive will know with an absolute surety the depths of man’s sin and depravity, and they’ll know as well that they can’t do a thing about it. They’ll know with a concrete knowledge born of experience that it’s not in the power of godless man to extricate himself from sin.
At present, in the happy moment that’s (hopefully) many generations from that dark place, we try, as Lent begins to begin, to set ourselves toward the path of that kind of knowledge, but with the sure hope of the saving power of Jesus Christ. Now, there’s time, and as weak as the American popular Christianity may be, it’s still nearly ubiquitous. So best to act in this window of time. Things have a way of changing faster than you can imagine.
Sorry. I know that’s kind of gloomy, but I’ll leave it at that and hope that the importance of acting to the fullest of our ability is worth talking like a Hal Lindsey book for a minute.
Related posts:
- “The Russian Priest”: On our relationship to the state
- Bush’s great speech
- God doesn’t desire sorrow
- Stories you won’t see in the NYT
- Moral: If you’re a Kennedy, don’t drive
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I’ve often used this handy rule of thumb for the Left/Right divide regarding liberty:
1. The Left is usually against government intrusion into people’s private lives (i.e., the bedroom), but usually ok with government intrusion into people’s economic lives.
2. The Right is usually against any government intrusion into people’s economic lives, but usually ok with government intrusion into people’s private lives (i.e., the bedroom).
That sounds about right as far as it goes, but it seems to me like things have been changing.
It *used* to be true that the Left was the side for “sexual liberation,” and so against any sort of legislation of the behavior that Christians deem immoral — fornication, adultery, homosexuality. But then, they have had to juggle that with their extreme fearfulness of what people do when the courts and government don’t have a say, and sometimes they lose. I remember a few years ago, some of the major universities (definitely not known for leaning to the Right) were saying that any male engaging in foreplay leading up to sex with a female had to ASK her if she was still consensual at every stage. You think that’s not intruding into the bedroom?
Plus, I feel like the Left is being disingenuous for including their pro-abortion stance as part of that “freedom in the bedroom” platform. Pro-lifers aren’t saying anything about what happens in the bedroom; it’s the decision to abort the pregnancy that’s the issue.
I’m not saying the Right is perfect. But I’ve never been able to buy that both sides are just as right and just as wrong. It’s real tempting to want to go there, because it lets you dismiss all the current ballyhoo as un-Christian. But I can’t see how it’s an accurate assessment of the current political landscape.