And positive minded organizations don’t even have to be Christian churches. The Christian church is the ultimate entity, or should be, in this category. But there are secular charities too, and they mostly carry out good works, if more distantly from God than the Christian church. Far may it be from me to try to stop them.
If, however, we stopped operating on the government grant basis, things could get better, not worse, as the taxation needed to support the grants could stop — and so could the bite taken by the government middlemen. I think this is the kind of greatness that Donald Trump has in mind, as opposed to the illusory “great society” which turned out to be a confused, biblically unwise society.
When you mention “great society,” I think of Thomas Paine’s debunking of that conceit.SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.Socialists generally are guilty of “confounding” as Paine would have it, “society” with “government” because socialists want to extinguish the word for society. They never say “government” when they mean society, it is always the other way around. They are evading the fact that society exists apart from government, and does things which they claim that the government can do “better.” But their “better” turns out, in fact, to be the enemy of good enough.Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one
I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read. It points out the subtlety and interconnectedness of the process by which people in society cooperate. AFAIK it never uses the word “society,” but that is the essence of the point it makes.
The “Great Society” promise was actually a boast of the ability to make a great government. And altho it made a big government, it signally failed even to maintain the quality of society we already had, and which was already improving itself. “Better” turned out to be much worse.