My view is that Big Government wants to kill me and take my money. Christians don’t. Conservatives don’t. Objectivists don’t. There aren’t any other issues that matter.
The great debates at the American Founding were between Libertarians and Conservatives. Those were the good old days, when we had the luxury of true geniuses with honest disagreements crafting a masterwork of governance and tradition.
Now we are in the fight of our lives: it's toxic to go looking for enemies among people with common cause.
“My view is that Big Government wants to kill me and take my money. Christians don’t. “
I am a Christian. I believe Big Government certainly may want to kill us and take our money. Christians believe that all men are sinners, in need of a savior. So I’d say we are pretty much aware that a government can be totally corrupt.
We are still supposed to submit to lawful authorities, unless they command us to sin.
We debate among ourselves what a lawful authority is from time to time.
I like your response and think it is much more concise and clear than anything I can say.
Rand worked from the basis of altruism and to an interesting extent she is correct. When one starts to get sucked into the whole idea of “social justice” vs. true charity one suddenly realizes what Rand may have been trying to communicate.
In the years that have passed since reading Atlas Shrugged with several book clubs it appears to me Rand was trying to point out how the idea of government altruism, coupled with religion as a propogandist is a device of evil.
Recently Glenn Beck with his magic chalkboards has started to diagram out this very idea of how progressives twist morality and turn it on its head. Rand’s past experiences and early life made her skeptical of religion as a place to find a true and loving God, therefore she lived out her life in the only way she knew how to protect her life.
While many discussions of Ayn Rand devolve into hateful hiss and spit matches on FR over her personal life, I find much of what Rand tried to teach us in Atlas Shrugged consistent with Natural Law. The same Natural Law spoken of by our Founder’s and the Pope.
Atlas Shrugged is well worth reading and discussing. There are two sections in the book that I have reread more than the book. One is, “The Money Speech” and the other is, “The Winston Tunnel.” Many people get hung up on the Money Speech’s first paragraph and miss or misinterpret the rest of the speech. This speech is where I think Rand tries to explain her difference between the communist concept of collective altruism and capitalist charity. She desperately dances around the idea of, “Thou shalt not steal,” in this fictionalized essay. One of the key phrases from that speech I now sign my outgoing email with is,
“An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more
than he has produced.” ~~D’Aconia, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.
The essay while it is called the Money Speech, if one considers it very carefully, even from a Christian perspective, it is about respect for your fellow man and how money can be observed as the gauge of a society’s morals. The money speech attempts to put money its proper place...a tool. As a tool it cannot be worshiped. http://usabig.com/autonomist/moneyspeech.html
First, big government doesn’t want to kill you. They want to defraud you, and if that doesn’t work to enslave you, and if you wont work hard enough, to torture you. Only if you are a noisy little piggy will they kill you.