Asking the Wrong Things of Government

We all know human organizations work better by being smaller and more efficient. But we also know that in partisans' mouths "smaller" and "more efficient" are primarily code-words for "less expensive." The real criteria of "small government" partisans, to the exclusion of almost every other consideration, is money.

It's one monomania of "conservatives" today. We easily assent to the plausibility of their madness because everyone knows government could be better if it were smaller, more efficient, and less costly. The problem is that the cost of government (or its size, or its efficiency) is the wrong criteria.

Any discussion of what is good, or "better," or "best" is a moral question, presented in moral terms. The problem is that moral questions speak to right and wrong; and the size, efficiency and cost of government are, in themselves, neither.

Made in the likeness of God...Who Alone IS Good, Jesus says...man has moral capability. Things created by man: whether ideas like efficiency, or objects like money: take on a moral dimension only in man's use of them. Governmental efficiency can be a moral evil, as in the crematoria of the Nazis. Government spending can be a moral good, as in our aid to the starving after that war.

The governmental systems and concepts men have devised can likewise only be considered in moral terms ("better," for example) according to how man uses them. Communism, for example, is morally judged not according to its paradisical concept, but on its hellish practice.

The great mistake in morally evaluating government is to draw the line the wrong place. Christian ideas and attitudes about moral government are rooted, first and only, in the Kingdom of God: perfect governance, owing nothing to man. Human governments may manifest some relative moral difference, between the "better" and the "worse." But all Christian consideration of government begins and ends in our King, Who Alone IS absolute Good.

The only line of distinction Christians should recognize, or take as their own, is between His rule and man's.