Thus without some earthly means of enforcing these Natural Laws, men will inevitably prey upon the rights of one another. This is a situation known as the state of nature, and as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, life under this system is “nasty, brutish, and short.” There is no respect for natural rights in such a horrible state – brute force is the only means of protection one may hope for. This is the system the world was under after the generation of Cain and Abel – and God had no choice but to wipe it out with the worldwide flood.
For any of our natural rights to be secure, there must be some earthly enforcement arm to protect natural rights and punish those who encroach upon them. The means of doing this that man came up with is government.
This is not to say that government is an enlightened or moral thing – it, like the state of nature, is hopelessly wicked to the core. A government, definitionally, is a human organization with the legal privilege of using force on innocent persons. As George Washington, summed it up, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” Government alone demands your unquestioning obedience, and drags you off to prison in chains to be tortured, executed, or whatever other dark measures it can imagine as punishment for refusing to grant it. It alone plunders your hard-earned money without consent, regulates your property, enslaves the citizens living under it, and sends your sons to bleed and die waging its wars. It relies on brute force, intimidation, and coercion to achieve its ends. This is the sum of political power – the most dangerous tool human beings have ever discovered. It is not natural for men to wield such vast and unchecked power over others – and consequently political power corrupts the morals, clouds the judgment, hardens the heart, and rots the soul. It is completely irrelevant where it comes from – consent of the… Read more
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