Politics & Filthy Lucre

Political and religious chaos in Egypt is the big world news of the day. There is rioting and violence in the streets. Social order is imploding and it looks like the nation is coming apart at the seams. If that sounds familiar it’s because this sort of turmoil and civil unrest is always happening somewhere in the world. It’s always frustrating and sad beyond words for the millions of innocent people involved.

Even the great imperial United States of America, which shamelessly prides itself as the most perfect political union in the history of mankind, is by no means immune. We’ve had our share of Civil War and plenty of other ongoing civil strife from the beginning.

People using politics and religion as clubs to force their will upon others is the curse of human civilization. As long as politics and religion, two sides of the same historical coin, are used to take financial or social advantage, there will be violence and unrest.

To the victors go the spoils: that’s always the problem. But imagine a civilization in which religions were matters of private individual conscience, and politics could not generate spoils. Remove the potential for tyranny and avarice from government and the motive for most political violence and civil unrest would simply vanish.

That is not simply a naive and unattainable pipe-dream objective. It is precisely the nature and scope of the “more perfect union” the founders envisioned in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States. A more perfect political union, they knew from experience, requires a limited form of representative government which operates separately from religion.

The evidence for this is demonstrated plainly in those founding documents. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 reads like a laundry list of political grievances against Great Britain. It reminded King George that governments are instituted among men to secure their rights; that governments derive all their powers from the consent of the governed; and when a government becomes destructive to those ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

With this expressed intent, the United States Constitution, in 1789, created three independent branches of secular government, each limited strictly to a short list of enumerated and circumscribed powers: a legislative branch to democratically determine policy; an executive branch to approve and carry it out; and a judicial branch to check it for validity and proper application.  

So far, for the most part, we have managed to avoid a theocracy, and all the tyranny that goes with them, (thanks entirely to the constant vigilance of religious minorities). The degree of politics in our lives, however, and all the spoils generated by politics, has grown to gigantic proportions over the years. Politics today is just as much a lucrative endeavor in the U.S.A., as it is anywhere in the world, including Egypt.

Both the legislative and executive branches of the United States government have stampeded right through the boundaries, trampling over individual liberty far beyond the limits of their constitutional powers, while the federal judiciary has mostly validated and rubber stamped their usurpations. People are utilizing politics more and more as a tool to force their will upon others for financial and social gain.

That is the reason behind political unrest and violence. That’s what makes people mad enough to rebel. It is not the fact that many honest successful people tend to have more stuff than others; most everyone accepts that; the anger is directed against those who have taken unfair advantage by means of government force and deception to gain undeserved wealth and power.

Among Thomas Jefferson’s long list of serious human rights violations charged against England’s King George by his cruelly abused 18^th century American subjects, is this little gem, which, I think, is particularly relevant today:

“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance...” 

Mind you, this was 1776. Yet it sounds just like FDR’s New Deal power grab, doesn’t it? It’s the War on Drugs, No Child Left Behind, Obama Care, TSA, DEA, ATF, FDA, IRS, and all the dozens of other three and four letter bureaucratic armed political acronyms rolled up into one, which have come to plague and bleed the American people.  Jefferson would be appalled.

Yes, it is decidedly true in so many ways that our very own loveable red, white and blue billboard icon, Uncle Sam, has become, over the last 235 years, even more the bloated irascible old tyrant than the fat, bumbling, gout infected English King he replaced.

 

Now, if we could only find and implement all the ways to take filthy lucre out of politics and government, we would not only avoid forever what is happening in Egypt, but our own revered and star spangled political union might indeed approach that philosophical ideal of perfection originally intended.