Posted by
Katherine Harms on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 4:01:52 PM
Election rhetoric is full of proposals for programs of all kinds. Candidates promise us that they will enact laws that solve problems and change people’s lives. History teaches us that it doesn’t work that way.
Programs do not transform people. The best they can do is to expose people to a different way of living. The people may or may not internalize what they see. The history of programs to address social need is that we spend more and more money without reducing the incidence of crime, hunger, disease or ignorance. A program works by enrolling participants, giving them services or training or money, and then graduating them when they are ineligible or the program is defunded. At the end, there are a lot of people who have been through the program. None of them is transformed by it.
For over 70 years this country has been creating and testing programs to address poverty, hunger, crime, education, healthcare, etc. If throwing money at problems would solve them, our problems would have been solved ten times over. Instead, it appears that each program has a few moments of glory and not much else to show for its existence. In the river of human grief the programs should address, there is hardly a ripple to show for all the government money that has been spent.
Socialism is a political idea that sounds a lot like the social and moral dimensions of Christian teaching: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Unfortunately, when this idea that sounds so kind is cloaked in bureaucracy and when the definitions of need and ability become political footballs, the society that results is more oppressive than the worst thing we have ever seen in a world of free people engaging in free enterprise to make profits. Social themes become the tools of terrible oppression when they do not grow out of transformed lives.
Barack Obama is the messiah of socialism. He preaches that government will take care of the citizens. All they need to do is give to government everything they have, and the government will give them back what it thinks they need. Government gets to decide what they need, too, and those who decide need more than anyone else. That is the gospel of socialism.
We must defeat Barack Obama. This country can’t afford Barack Obama. I will vote for John McCain, because I do not want to live in the Union of Socialized Americans.