A common joke among Communists during the Cold War was that when they finally conquered the world, they would have to leave one country free to help them determine the prices for goods and services. Prices are determined by the law of supply and demand in a free market. Government bureaucrats do not have the ability, or the omniscient wisdom, to set the correct prices for goods. Without the marketplace, all they can do is guess or show preference for their pet projects – even if those projects are as outdated as the buggy whip.
Every day there are many anxious and accurate foreboding news stories about the collapse of capitalism and republican democracy in the wake of the first few weeks of the imposition of President Barack Obama’s socialist policies. Many pundits are saying we warned you, so now you must suffer the consequence of allowing the mass media and the nomenklatura foist this radical socialist on the electorate by pretending that he was a moderate. Many of us have been making dire predictions that prosperity precedes Almighty God’s judgment – a judgment that includes the exchange of true liberty for bondage and of values for immorality.
In fact, I have been preaching this very warning since the late 1990s. In the Old Testament, God continually tells His chosen people, the Israelites, that He wants to prosper them, but, when He does, they soon forget Him and fall for the solipsistic lie that they did it themselves – so He abandons them to stew in the juice of their own selfishness. Thus, as a result of their turning away from the perfect harmony and true liberty of His Kingdom, He relents to their demands for earthly kings who, according 1 Samuel 8, will take their sons to put in their army, force their daughters to become their servants and steal their property to turn to the king’s own profit. Eventually, God gives the selfish ingrates over to lusts that destroy the family and the fabric of society. Chapter 1 of Romans is a roadmap of a process that occurs regularly in the history of Israel and all mankind, a process that includes widespread perversion, rebellion against parents and authority, and the politics of greed and envy.
Even within this collapse of culture due to the selfishness of fallen peoples, it must be noted that the apparent triumph of tyrannical, statist bureaucracy bears its own seeds of destruction, and the current rush to socialism will bear the same fruit. Socialism, mercantilism, statism, government tyranny – whatever you want to call it – is historically, economically and spiritually untenable. When it’s been tried before throughout history – in Egypt, Babylon, Rome and Russia – it has brought about its own demise.
Why?
Because government control destroys the incentive to work. As the joke went in Communist Russia, the government pretended to pay and the workers pretended to work. Why work when all your hard labor is confiscated by the State to give to feudal bureaucrats and union lackeys living in luxury?
Slavery means having all your labor accrue to the benefit of someone else. In the United States, six months of most people’s labor goes to the State. Like a thief, the government has seized our earnings to distribute to a bloated bureaucracy, with some left over for their pet peccadilloes. When the legalized plunder of the government takes even more of our earnings, most of us will lose all interest in working for no return. We will be slaves to the Washington plantation.
But, the more power and control over you and the economy President Obama and the useful idiots around him accrue to their socialist utopia, the less they will be able to sustain it. They won’t know how to set prices and wages realistically, because they will have no objective standards to know what those wages and prices really should be. And, because fewer and fewer people will want to work hard to keep President Obama and his fellow bureaucrats in champagne and caviar, the money for their pet projects will begin to dry up.
So, people of faith and values need to be optimistically looking forward to the hope of the collapse of the tyrannical state and the triumph of the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and His righteousness in order to rebuild that shining city on a hill that America once was. We must preach that Gospel and prepare to rebuild the collapsed structures of society, once Obama’s socialist policies fail or he and his cronies disappear from the world stage sometime in the near or distant future. Just as they have done throughout the last 2,000 years, all of these mono-maniacal government systems come and go, and we must be vigilantly ready with the Gospel.
In spite of the recent Newsweek headline, “We’re all socialists now,” socialism is untenable. The birth dearth and the atrophy of socialist culture in Communist Russia and socialist Europe have already shown us the future of socialism in the United States. And, other forms of feudalistic, anthropocentric systems will end up in the dustbin of history, as Ronald Reagan (and the Word of God) predicted.
It may take months. It may take years. And, it may take decades. But, spring will come, winter will thaw, and liberty and truth will triumph.
Note: Dr. Tom Snyder contributed to this column.
