by Michael Quinn Sullivan, CEO of Empower Texans
Psalm 121 says, “I lift my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”
Easy for him to say. He didn’t have CNN, Fox News, Drudge Report, and every other media outlet screaming that civilization is about to end! Between the Chinese coronavirus being likened to a combination of the Black Plague and Spanish Flu, and the price of oil plummeting as a result of an economic Battle Royale between Russia and Saudi Arabia, human misery is knocking at our door.
Jobless claims in America last week totaled 3.28 million, a level four times higher than the previous record. In Texas, unemployment doubled, and is headed towards 9 percent, and beyond. Texas’s previous peak was 9.2 percent in 1986. People are suffering.
Yet the Psalmist did, in fact, know precisely of which he wrote. For him it was fairly recent world history. His entire people had been rescued from slavery, given the opportunity to establish a self-governing land — which they repeatedly squandered for 400 years — and then were finally and ultimately given over to their sinful desire for a strongman-king to replace the High King of heaven.
The Old Testament’s Book of Judges gets overlooked by most Christians today. The stories are hard, the names complex, and their relationships messy. Few of the stories make for the safe, positive Sunday School songs we have come to expect. It is a shame, because it has so much to teach us about how our hearts respond to troubled times.
During that period, the people of Israel would lose faith, stumbling from the path given to them directly by God through Moses. Then, after a righteous leader rose up among the people and offered vision and a way back, they would temporarily return. The story of redemption is told using a cast of characters we would easily recognize from the evening news.
That happened again and again, right up until the time of Samuel.
The people looked around at other nations and saw they were unique without an earthly king, and they didn’t trust Samuel’s sons as their judges, so they asked Samuel to appoint for them a king.
Samuel was aghast; God was their King! Samuel took their demand as a personal slight, but God told him: “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.”
Through Samuel, God told the people all the bad things a king would do… yet they still went with it.
In times of trouble, it is natural that we would look for help. It is our sin that makes us seek help from man; from kings and politicians. In His perfect love, God has ordained a better way.
In our national situation today, the politicians want us groveling for low-interest loans — of our own money. The politicians want us thanking them for sending us checks… that will be paid for by us. The politicians want us to shelter in place, shuttering our business and disassociating from our churches, so that we will have no choice but to set our eyes on them.
The Lone Star State offers contrasting examples of the right and wrong path.
Dallas County and Collin County represent the east side of the DFW metroplex. Dallas, which has shifted a California-like blue politically, is bordered to the north by the historically Republican Collin. Dallas is home to, well, Dallas. While Collin’s cities — Plano, McKinney, among others — aren’t as well known, they are home to some of the nation’s leading corporations.
Dallas County’s chief administer — we call them “judges,” despite their lack of judicial activity — issued a draconian order closing “non-essential” businesses, restricting gatherings, and threatening people with fines or jail should he be ignored. Collin County’s judge, on the other hand, issued a more thoughtful request that the people should follow commonsense protocols from health experts, work at home if they could, but encouraged businesses to stay open if they could do so safely.
Dallas offered threats, Collin offered sympathy. My email box was filled with reports of people in Dallas County who were either scared… or looking for opportunities to ignore the order. Step across the county line — which is invisible thanks to the region’s rapid urbanization — and life wasn’t normal, but it also wasn’t fearful.
President Trump has taken in recent days to saying the “cure” to the coronavirus cannot be worse than the disease itself. He’s right.
The governing side effects from the treatment we allow politicians to take in “curing” this sudden malaise of physical and economic health will linger. We must not allow “cower in place” orders to become the new normal. We must reject the notion that government can bully our churches into silence. We must not accept the growth of a “benevolent” government.
Gerald Ford, of all people, once said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” He was certainly right about that.
Even in super-Republican Texas, we hear grumblings that the looming state budget problems this present crisis will inevitably cause must be addressed with more money. Let us not forget too quickly that just 12 months ago, Texas was suffering from an embarrassment of riches — literally.
Our thriving economy meant the state’s coffers were filled to the brim, overflowing with a record $10.5 billion state surplus. This happy problem was solved, of course, by Republican and Democrat lawmakers spending every penny and dipping into the state’s reserves.
A modest tax relief package — which no everyday Texan saw or felt, except in the most abstract way — was dwarfed by legislators’ new spending. When one expects the good times to last, maxing out the credit card isn’t a bad way to live, but for mere mortals in state government lacking a Federal Reserve printing them new currency, the bills will soon come due.
And that is the situation in which we find ourselves.
There are already subtle calls to raid the state’s “rainy day” fund — that, after all, would be to avoid cutting the newly bloated programs. Worse, there are soft whispers to increase those bloated and inefficient programs with new revenues.
New revenues, of course, is polite code for “raising taxes and hiking fees.” It should not escape notice that locales at home and abroad with the worst coronavirus problems are also those with the highest levels of socialism.
Big government, it turns out, is the worst pre-existing condition imaginable when confronted with a pandemic.
In his seminal work The Tragedy of American Compassion, written nearly 30 years ago, Marvin Olasky traced how the modern approach to serving the afflicted and needy through government programs has failed. It¡¯s failed not because it spends too much or too little, but because it is a failed philosophy. It is what he calls ¡°pseudo-compassion.”
Fortunately, we have a better way. The French economist Frederick Bastiat once wrote, “And now that the legislators and do-gooders have futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty.”
Elected officials must resist the urge to “do something,” because inevitably it will be misused. Some things, undoubtedly, need to be done. But carefully.
Citizens, likewise, must resist the urge to ask for so-called “protection,” lest they find their cherished rights removed and their pockets emptied.
The marketplace of ideas and products provides a far better field from which to solve whatever ills might befall than a conference room of self-proclaimed experts. A free people tend to give more freely, of themselves and their money, and then hold each other accountable. Personal responsibility must be lovingly tied to a sense of obligation to our neighbors.
This is precisely what God intended for His people. It is what our republic’s Founding Fathers sought to emulate by restricting the power of government. They intended the power of government only to secure our rights, while harnessing the unique talents and skills of the people to solve their own problems and care for each other most appropriately.
A self-governing people — who rely on their neighbors and fellow parishioners, and are themselves relied upon — cast their eyes to heaven and are, as a result, able to provide real compassion and real solutions.