Posts Tagged ‘poverty’
Can We Really “Vote Out Poverty?”
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Economics, Liberty, Thoughts
I received another email today from Sojourners. No matter how many times I unsubscribe, I seem to stay on their mailing list. No matter. They provide good food for thought, if only because Jim Wallis is Doing It Wrongtm.
The email in question implored me to join their campaign to “Vote out Poverty”, which is some vaguely-articulated voter pledge to put overcoming poverty at the top of your priority list when you vote in November. The pledge reads as follows:
Dear candidates,
Because of my faith, I pledge to make overcoming poverty central to how I cast my ballot in 2008. I want to hear your commitment and plans for achieving the following goals:
-Cutting the number of Americans living in poverty in half over the next 10 years.
-Help end extreme global poverty by achieving the Millennium Development Goals.I want to see your leadership on these important issues and will inform my friends and family of your positions.
Sincerely,
(Your Name)
At first, I used to be afraid that the Jim Wallis brand of Christian socialism would transform or overtake the “Christian Right”, thus arraying a huge American demographic behind ideas that would exponentially increase poverty, death and destruction worldwide through massive government anti-poverty and foreign aid programs. But that fear has subsided because of campaigns like this.
First of all, it’s easy to ignore. It’s a voter pledge and a request for information. There is almost nothing confrontational about that pledge. It makes no demands on the politician. All sentences begin with the word “I”, placing focus on the voter and what they want to see. What they want to see is described in abstract terms: commitment, plans, leadership. It asks for nothing specific and almost none of the focus is on the politician. This has got to be the most limp-wristed communication to a politician I’ve ever seen.
Second, it’s easy to pander to. The only two concrete objects in this voter pledge are in that short bulleted list. Cutting the number of Americans living in poverty by half? This is the government you’re lobbying. They get to decide the definitions. Cutting the number of people under the poverty line is as easy as legislating a new poverty line. George W. Bush has provided America with 2 million new jobs since he came to office, simply by creating a vast make-work program called the TSA. Now hordes of otherwise unemployed people rifle through your luggage for a living. The Millennium Development Goals are a set of pie-in-the-sky goals formulated by a UN committee including worldwide elementary education, worldwide AIDS treatment, and an end to world hunger. These are great goals to have, but the UN’s pursuit of them would produce tragic consequences at best, and none of them are phrased in concrete terms.
Government can solve any problem just by changing a few definitions, or exerting some token effort and then absolve itself of responsibility.
Worst of all about the first of the two items is that 10 years is longer than any United States election cycle. Senators do not think any farther than 6 years ahead, a Congressman’s horizon is 2 years away, and presidents, at best, only worry as far as 8 years into the future. Anything longer than that, and whichever political party the politician isn’t from will be his scapegoat as to why he never accomplished what you asked. He is free to make whatever promises you desire so long as failure doesn’t threaten his cushy job. There’s simply no accountability. It leaves too much up to the candidates. How will they cut poverty in half? How will they accomplish the UN’s goals? They could come up with almost anything and when it fails, they can shrug and say they tried, and the excuse will be perfectly legitimate.
But lastly and most importantly, look at who they’re asking! Here we have a group that presumes to be Christian, and they are lobbying the government to accomplish the tasks Christ charged the Christian Church with fulfilling?! America’s Christian Right is still by and large a deluded lot of uncritical lambs that applaud the growth of the state and ignore their own dying Church. The attempts of Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and other silver-tongued socialists to create a Christian Left have been fortunately ineffective so far, but even if they are successful, the Christian Left is just as obsessed with government power as today’s Christian Right.
Whether you’re demanding the government overturn Roe v. Wade or insisting that it curb poverty, your error is the same. The State is inherently sinful. The thing that distinguishes government from other kinds of organizations is its universal and unilateral deployment of aggressive force. An appeal to government is an appeal to force. Jesus Christ was an emissary of love, not of coercion, so the Church and State are at opposite ends of the spectrum. If Christ wanted us to use guns and violence to get our way, he would have said so.
The Church is the domain of God, and the government is the domain of Satan, just as much today as it was when he tempted Christ by offering him the governments of the world. There is only one thing government can do to help further the cause of Christ, and that is to get out of the Church’s way.
Groups that appeal to the State to solve society’s problems have apparently lost their faith that the infinite power of God is sufficient to change the world. They must believe instead that worldly forces and violence are the only tools available.
I, as a Christian, have to insist that the Church, backed by God Almighty, has much more potential for good than the State can ever dream. If that is the case, then why bother lobbying government, the one organization guaranteed to not take those goals seriously?