But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress of 1889.

Believe it or not, it was communism that was seeking the eight-hour work week over a century ago.  And the eight-hour work week, as enforced by law in the United States, is the perfect example of the collectivist mentality in action.  It is an attempt to force equality on all, at least in the area of working conditions, despite the fact that a great many workers would prefer to work more than forty hours per.  In the United States, the 40-hour workweek is not directly enforced, but rather indirectly, through a heavy-handed “overtime” law, which requires that pay go up by 50% for all labor in excess of forty hours in a given work-week.  This causes businesses to be very reluctant to allow overtime, and decreases the freedom of all the workers who struggle to pay their bills because they are unable to put in more forty hours.  At the same time, it benefits the workers who are lucky enough to be in a company that needs the extra labor and is disinclined to hire more workers, because every worker is a massive legal risk.

The eight-hour workday forced upon the worker by law is also a typical socialist law in that it claims to be for the worker while simultaneously constricting the worker’s options.

There are a variety of approaches to answering it.  The most common is what we might call the “Marxist” response, although radical Marxists make up only a tiny percentage of those who advocate it.  The Marxist position is that there is something unhealthy in the holding of property, an inherent evil that will naturally lead to the existence of a wealthy controlling class and will make cattle of the poor.  The radical Marxist will advocate the ending of all property rights.  Other leftists will admit that the existence of private property, despite its exploitative tendencies, is for some reason necessary.  So the soft Marxist will advocate government regulation of property rights, with a sliding scale of property taxes and other devices to reduce inequality and keep the rich in check.

Another option is what we might call stereotypical right-wingerism.  The stereotypical right-winger will respond that the poor are in trouble because they are simply stupid, lazy, worthless people who refuse to work.  He maintains that the only way to stop them from sucking all the wealth out of the nation is to remove all government helps for them and to promote anything big business every does.  He looks at the billionaires of the world and assumes that the massive wealth they have is the result of their being good people and hard workers.  One such fellow I knew, a junior-high student named Tim, was raised wealthy and was convinced that our country would become a better place if we simply restricted the vote to the wealthy and vastly increased the number of police in bad neighborhoods.

But there is a third option.  The third option is libertarianism.  Libertarianism embraces the concept of inequality.  Let me clarify.  The libertarianism believes that the economy can be boiled down to a variety of people trying to get a variety of things and doing whatever they think is the best way to get those things.  For the libertarian, things boil down to incentives, and the fact that one’s well-being will depend on one’s effort is a great stimulus to constructive action.  So the libertarian believes that inequality is not a monster to be exterminated but rather a positive force.  Don’t get us wrong, though.  Libertarians do acknowledge that there are exploiters out there, people whose greed and control leads to unhealthy and unnatural levels of inequality and oppression.  The more theoretically-minded divide the entire society into an exploiters and exploitees.  But there’s a crucial difference.  We see the primary destructive economic force as not business per se, but government interference.  We believe a number of counterintuitive ideas, such as that minimum wage laws harm the poor, that taxing the wealthy heavily hurts the poor, that zoning laws destroy small business, and that both the poor, middle class, and rich are best off in a world off laissez-faire.

And so the when we oppose legislation designed to redistribute wealth, it’s not that we don’t like the poor.  It’s that we believe different things are helpful.  Even hard-core libertarians are appalled at the way the elite have shared a level of growth that the middle class and the poor have missed out on.  The real question, then, isn’t how much inequality there may or may not be.  The real question is not whether liberalism or libertarianism view is most compassionate.  The real question is whether governmentally imposed outcomes are better than voluntarily reached outcomes.  The real questions are these:  Does a minimum wage protect the poor, or does it hurt them?  Is it Walmart that’s destroying our small businesses, or is it zoning laws?  Is the war on drugs making our poor neighborhoods safer, or turning them into hell-holes?  Does government involvement in healthcare mean that we get better care, or is it making healthcare worse and more expensive?  Is social security an important way we care for our older folks, or is it a Ponzi scheme?  The questions could go on and on, but the libertarian is the one who sees government interference as almost always counter-productive.  We see the exploiting class not as the local MacDonald’s that gives you $1 sandwiches, but as the well-connected politicians and their beneficiaries who receive trillions of dollars of your money and get to tell you what to do with your life.

I can’t speak for all libertarians, but it is my belief that the poor are indeed being oppressed that drives my libertarianism.

Bible exegesis frequently is little more than an exercise in defending whatever particular system is currently in place.  In this case, the United States government basis its legitimacy on an interesting and often self-contradictory set of political ideals which are in sum total often referred to as “civil government.”  And when we simply take an undefined term and then find justification for it in the Bible, we must ask ourselves, what exactly does the term mean?  And, of course, if we can find no clear meaning of any sort for the term, our whole Biblical exegesis dissolves into silliness.

It is our assumption that empty terms mean something, and that unstated implications may be automatically derived from Biblical texts, that leads many honest people into huge mental leaps.  Another bad habit is merely inserting a biblical book-chapter-verse reference into a sentence without grappling with what that verse actually says.  That all said, let’s start.

Kerby Anderson begin his exploration into the Christian view of government with a statement rife with assumption:

The Old Testament teaches that God established government after the flood (Gen 9:6).

This sentence looks straightforward at first glance.  After the flood, God set up a system by which a class of leaders was instituted with the power to regulate human behavior by making decrees binding upon law.  But let’s look at the text itself and see whether Kerby Anderson’s starting point for understanding  government is on solid ground.  Here’s Genesis 9:6:

Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God he made man.

Whoa!  This sounds more like a policy of vigilante justice than an establishment of a government institution. There’s no hint of any government.  Just the word of God that murders shall have their blood spilt.  Now, some may say that this implies a sense of justice, which therefore demands judgment of evil people, which therefore demands that a particular class of people must be created who through a variety of procedures have the power to tell the other class of people what to do, and that we shall call that class government.  That conclusion would be based not on the Genesis 9:6, but on preconceived notions.  In a great many societies throughout world, capital punishment has historically meant that if someone murders a person you care greatly about, you would then have the perceived legitimate right to go kill that person.  So the so-called government instituted by Genesis 9:6 is nothing but a product of imposing our own interpretation of what government is onto the text–the exact opposite of what forming a biblical view is supposed to be about.

Mr. Anderson then concludes that the Bible does not command what system of government ought to exist.

[The Bible] does not propose nor endorse any specific political system. The Bible, however, does provide a basis for evaluating various political philosophies because it clearly delineates a view of human nature. And every political theory rests on a particular view of human nature.

The Bible describes two elements of human nature. This viewpoint is helpful in judging government systems. Because humans are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27), they are able to exercise judgment and rationality.  However, humans are also fallen creatures (Gen. 3).

It is true that the Bible gives these two viewpoints on human nature–the image of God and the fall.  But Mr. Kerby makes an important assumption which we’ll get back to in a moment:  This viewpoint is helpful in judging government systems.  Let’s see how well his belief in the human-nature argument shows itself when we evaluate government systems.

He begins by outlining his view that what we need is civil government.

This human sinfulness (Rom. 3:23) has therefore created a need to control evil and sinful human behavior through civil government.

Again, Mr. Anderson has made a sweeping statement with a Biblical reference in parentheses.  And once again, we need to see exactly what the Bible says and exactly what Mr. Anderson is making it say.  So here’s Romans 3:23:

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.

Again we find not a word about government in the verse Mr. Anderson quotes.  All this verse tells is that we have all sinned.  Not a word about what’s to be done about this in terms of government.  All we’re told is that people do some things wrong.  What we are not told is anything about “civil government,” whatever that is.

Unfortunately, Mr. Anderson simply introduces a term without defining it again.  So I’ll take a crack at what the definition means.  Typically, civil government means “a class of individuals who are given specific roles in creating a set of decrees which all other persons are expected to obey because of the legitimacy of the class of individuals who decree it, and who are given the ability to take away resources from the non-governing class to pay for the costs of enforcing their decrees, and who have the right to use violence against those who disobey the commands of the governing class.”  Romans 3:23 calls out for no such thing.

Again, Mr. Anderson is adding his ideas to Bible references, rather than the reverse.

He mucks about a while in similarly meaningless talk, and then reaches an interesting point in his discussion–the point where he tries to take on the question of whether we even need a working class:

God ordained civil government to restrain evil (cf. Gen. 9). Anarchy, for example, is not a viable option because all have sinned (Rom. 3:23) and are in need of external control.

Again, we brings of Genesis 9, which as we stated before establishes at most a rationale for vigilante killings.  And then he makes an argument which, at first glance, seems to make sense:  Anarchy cannot work because people are inherently bad enough that they will not behave themselves without external control. But what is the external control which Mr. Anderson sees as the magic bullet for controlling the bad nature of mankind?  Other people given the weapons and moral authority to forcibly suppress the non-government class when it misbehaves.

But if a person is not to be trusted managing his own affairs, how does that legitimize a jump to assuming that setting up a ruling class to manage others’ affairs will be better?  That is, if people without the authority to control others are going to do bad things, are those giving the power of life and death over others not even more likely to engage is horrible acts?

And so Kerby Anderson’s use of sin-based logic, if we may call it logic, is not really constructive reasoning but rather a tool that can be turned whichever way its user desires.  Anarchy is not an option because sinful people will misbehave if not externally controlled, might just as easily be turned around to Giving one class the right to use violence to force others to do what they judge best is not an option because those given such power will abuse their underlings are controlled by them, or even the pessimistic We have no options because people will misbehave whether ungoverned, governed, or governing.

And so Romans 3:23 does not show itself sufficient to establish the necessity of government.  What gets really fun is to start looking at the way Kerby Anderson starts shooting down political strategies.

Take, for example, his condemnation of Marxism.  His reasoning goes thusly:  Marx believes that if everything is distributed equally in a classless society when the workers seize the means of production, a perfect society will emerge.  Obviously, a perfect society is incompatible with the biblical doctrine of sin and therefore we reject Marxism.  But all that Mr. Anderson has really rejected here is Marx’s theology, not his political system.  To put it differently, imagine that someone were to say:  “Human nature is indeed bad and greedy, and therefore things will work out best if we destroy public property, seize the means of production, and produce a stateless society.”  This sort of government would escape all of Mr. Anderson’s critique of Marxism while in practice doing the exact same thing.  So Mr. Anderson only thinks he is analyzing the Marxist political system;  all he is really doing is talking theology but not really condemning the political practices that we call Marxism.

He goes farther in his response to Plato’s notion of philosopher-kings ruling society.  Mr. Anderson says that we must reject the philosopher-kings notion because they too are fallen sinners.  But this leads us to a great problem, if we are to reject the rule of people called philosopher-kings on the basis of their sinful nature, why are we not to similarly dismiss the rule of sinners called presidents, prime ministers, senators, congressmen, sheriffs, deputies, marshals, chairmen, governors, council members, agents, or superintendents?  Why not scrap every plan of government altogether, because any government must be composed of sinners?

Mr. Anderson rejects rule by sinners, but also rejects anarchy.  You can’t reject both!  It’s one, or it’s the other.  It’s that simple.  He also writes on and on, a great deal of talk about liberty and rights and God and humanism and secularism and divorce and insurance and whatnot.  But he never answers a simple question:  who has the right to enforce the rules that everyone else has to follow at gunpoint?  If we cannot hand those powers to a group of sinners, nor to the whole society of sinners, who shall enforce the law?  And until he can answer that, his words about the meaning of government are hollow meaningless contradictions.

If Kerby Anderson or anyone else wants to tell us how they feel about government, they’re welcome to do it.  But pretending to be presenting a biblical perspective while using ultra-flexible “principles” that can be used to support any view the author wants is an abuse of the Bible to serve one’s own purposes.  It’s exactly what gives so many people grounds to resent Christian efforts to influence government.

That’s Rupert Murdoch’s take on web-based news.  For those who don’t know, Rupert Murdoch is a marketing mogul.  His understanding of how the news game works has swelled his net worth to approximately $4 billion.

Murdoch is planning to put up a pay wall around the online content of his newspapers.  Fair enough.  It may be that his profits will be helped by making people buy his content.  On the other hand, it may just hand over a greater market share to others.

What is very strange, though, is his feeling that Google and Microsoft are somehow robbing him of his profits.    It’s a strange thing for someone to post his newspaper content freely online and then be surprised when search engines point people toward that content.  Google’s not taking his stuff.  He been giving the newspaper content away.

Further, it seems that he definitely does not comprehend the incredible scope of the internet.  There are countless sites with news of all sorts on them.  It is possible that if Murdoch and other media folks can consistently generate content that a significant number of people find superior, they will pay for that content.

But thinking that walling off information will leave readers with nowhere else to go is just silly.  As more and more people wall off their information behind pay walls, the sites which keep their content free will receive more and more visitors, raising their advertizing revenues.

So any attempt by a news group to wall off their content will simply make providing free content more profitable for other groups.  Murdoch’s analysis ignores this.  News corporations just don’t have the necessary economic incentives to leave us with ‘nowhere else to go.’

Murdoch has made the most common mistake of economics:  basing his ideas on the unspoken assumption that an entire sector acts in unity, and not competition.  It’s the same horrifically flawed assumption that gave us Marxism–a class-warfare based system that assumed that employers weren’t competing against one another.