Media Monday --- The Direction of Government

Well, here we are with another week gone by, and you just can't escape government in the news. This week, Obama decided to take away the conviction clause that would allow doctors to abstain from doing abortions if it went against their religious beliefs (so much for separation of church and state/freedom of religion), he took away all the governmental bans on funding for stem cell research (so much for saving money and taking a scalpel to our budget), and we are hearing more and more about the government taking over the banks, health care, etc, etc, etc. So, what does this all mean?

Well, when we look at politics throughout all history, there are 5 models of government:

1) Anarchy (the people have total control/no government)

2) Republic (the people have some control/limited government)

3) Democracy (the people and government share control)

4) Oligarchy (an elite group of government have control)

5) Dictatorship (one person has total control)

Although these sound possible in theory, you can eliminate 3 of these as long term governments. Anarchy results from people rebelling against government and trying to tear them down. Every group of anarchists throughout history have had an agenda in mind as to who would take over power if they did overthrow the government...so there is no such thing as an anarchy rule (the people in total control) as it would eliminate all laws, military, etc, etc, etc (as someone would have to run these things)...it is only a temporary attempt to overthrow a government.

Same with dictatorship...even the most notorious dictators (ie: Hitler) had his group of goons working with him. In reality, he was the leader of an oligarchy, where a select few were in charge of the masses.

Democracy also doesn't work. Our Founding Fathers were very purposeful in not mentioning democracy in any of our founding documents. They believed 100% in a Republic....where a limited government would represent (not rule) the people. In a true democracy, majority would always rule...so a criminal trial would only need 50% for a conviction, if at anytime the senate wanted to overthrow the president they could as long as they got a 50% vote, if city council voted 5-4 to take your house away, in a true democracy they could without other reason. All democracies were very short lived and fail miserably and always result in a Republic or an Oligarchy (depending on if they give more power to the people or the government).

So that brief history brings us to the point of this post. Our Founding Fathers dreamed of and set us up as a Republic. The government is to represent the people. We know we can't have anarchy nor a dictatorship, and democracy can't and doesn't work. So we are left with 2 possibilities --- remain a Republic or become an Oligarchy where the elite government officials rule the people rather than for the people. All this nationalization and government control of everything is slowly taking us down a path I don't think we want to go. But maybe our time is up. Consider the cycle of great countries throughout history:

1) From bondage to spiritual faith

2) From spiritual faith to great courage

3) From courage to liberty

4) From liberty to abundance

5) From abundance to complacency

6) From complacency to apathy

7) From apathy to dependence

8) From dependence back to bondage

It takes about 200 years to go through this cycle and we are in year 233. I see us somewhere around #6 moving toward #7...and the Oligarchy would put us in dependence on government. Very scary thought. Where/what do you all see us moving toward?