Our Paternal Government

Unrest in England and friction between King Charles I and Parliament that culminated in the English Civil War in mid seventeenth century inspired Sir Robert Filmer, a supporter of the King and member of England’s “Divine Right” party, to write a book defending the Divine Right of Kings based on Christian scriptures.  The book titled “Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings” was based on the Biblical account of Adam being given dominion over the lands and inhabitants of earth by God.  Filmer argued that this absolute power of Adam was derived from his position as the father of all men and passed down through Adam’s heirs generation after generation giving existing kings absolute, unquestioned authority over the lives of their subjects. He argued that the king’s power was patriarchal, and that his relationship to his subjects was like that of a father over his children.

Patriarcha was published in 1680, long after Filmer’s death and it sparked a number of rebuttals.  The best known of these was “Two Treatises on Government” written by John Locke and published anonymously in 1689.  In the first treatise Locke effectively destroys Filmer’s Biblical arguments with what appears to be superior knowledge of the scriptures, and then he employs the obvious arguments regarding the impossibility of identifying Adam’s true heirs in the seventeenth century to demolish any bits of credibility left to the Biblical derivation or justification of the Divine Right of Kings.  In the second treatise Locke goes on to define the origins and purposes of government and eliminate any similarity between government and paternity. 

Now, more than three hundred years later, many are attempting to reverse Locke’s arguments and once again equate government with paternity – or rather its gender neutral version, parenthood.  These people want to be taken care of by government as a child by its parents and even in adulthood have the inalienable rights of a child to the care and nutriment owed to an infant.  Thousands of people of this mindset are currently engaged in demonstrations in Europe and America.  Here in the United States these demonstrations originated in New York City and are called “Occupy Wall Street”.

Like spoiled teenagers the Occupy Wall Street crowd refuses to respect their parental figure, the government they make demands upon.  They refuse to abide by its rules, yet demand that it provide for them not only the necessities of life but also many of the luxuries.  They claim these demands as their “rights” as if it were not contrary to logic that any adult could have a right to something that someone else must provide, when in fact such a claim can only be made by a dependent child claiming the necessities of life from its parents.

If confronted by the question of payment for the goods and services demanded as their rightful due, the demanders shrug off the question like a boy demanding new designer jeans from his parents who always seem to have money even if they claim poverty. The money will come from “someplace”.  It always has, it always will. 

The “someplace” for our Occupy Wall Street mob is from the “Rich”.  As long as there is anyone that has more money than required for survival there is a source of funds that can be confiscated by the government to satisfy the needs and desires of its children.  No one seems to think beyond that; they believe that for some reason the rich will continue to sow while others reap; and for a delusional few, the answer is to eliminate the concept of money altogether and just have everyone share everything produced by the producers who will continue to produce for the benefit of the non-producers for some unknown and unknowable reason. 

But these childlike demands on government are not unique to the Wall Street occupiers, and they are not a new phenomenon. These protesters are merely naive enough or blatant enough to state their demands explicitly; they are merely expressing out loud what they’ve been taught by parents, professors, and politicians for decades.  For more than a century American citizens and corporations have become increasingly dependent on government and have been willing to trade liberty for a secure place in its parental lap.  Increasingly we depend on the government to educate us, to nurture us, to coddle us, and to protect us from ourselves.  Increasingly we have turned our lives over to government to escape the responsibilities of providing for ourselves and thinking for ourselves. Yet, like adolescents, we rebel when asked to control our desires or contribute to the family.

Ironically, the nominal cause of the Occupy Wall Street protests is the same as the original spark that fired the Tea Party Movement – the bailout of massive corporations with taxpayer dollars.  Both groups are incensed by corporate welfare, but the Tea Party Movement, perhaps with a more mature view of history, sees a return to constitutionally limited government as the answer, while the Occupy Wall Street protesters prefer to destroy the corporations, or tax them to the brink of insolvency, leaving a powerful government to take care of its children. 

A government as envisioned and created by the Founders and Framers of the United States of America, as inspired by John Locke among others, is not powerful enough to hold all of society against its breast and provide security and insurance from failure.  The government defined by our Constitution is not parental; its functions are limited; its entanglements few; its maintenance minimal; its citizens, and corporations of citizens, free – free to succeed and free to fail.