This is the eighth installment in The Western Journal’s series “Biden-Harris Breaking the Ten Commandments.” Click here to read the rest of the series.
Like many of the other commandments we have covered in this series, the eighth packs much more meaning that can be gleaned by isolating it .
“You shall not steal,” Exodus 20:15 said.
Within the biblical context, stealing is so much more than the simple act of taking an object that doesn’t belong to you.
The eighth commandment (like all the others) speaks to deeper truths about morality.
For example it — the very Word of God — assumes private ownership of property. After all, if that property didn’t belong to someone else, how could you steal it?
From that assumption flowed the vast economic human flourishing
Theologian Wayne Grudem agrees that the foundational importance of the Eighth Commandment on modern society should not be understated.
He also made a point to note that governments “violate” this commandment “at their peril.”
“[T]his commandment provides the necessary foundation for all human flourishing on the face of the earth. Governments and cultural traditions violate the Eighth Commandment at their peril, for wherever this commandment is ignored, entire nations remain trapped in poverty forever. When that happens, they tragically fail to achieve many of God’s purposes for them on the earth,” Grudem wrote in The Gospel Coalition.
Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has indeed violated — and facilitated the violation of — the Eighth Commandment, and just as Grudem predicted, peril has followed.
The current administration’s failure regarding the Eighth Commandment is two-fold.
On the one hand, the president’s administration has refused to take definitive action against evildoers committing this crime, as is its God-appointed duty. Doing so inevitably encourages and incentivizes more theft.
On the other hand, the Biden-Harris regime also disregards property rights with its punitive taxation and inflationary spending.
Biden and Harris are devaluing and pilfering the very property of those who they are ordered by God to protect.
Refusing to Bear the Sword
In part one of this series, we discussed how the Biden-Harris administration had fashioned itself into a false god, violating the First Commandment.
This administration did so, in part, by attempting to replace God’s morality with its own.
But the second way it did so was by abandoning its God-given assignment to punish wrongdoers (see Romans 13:4).
Many thieves, robbers, looters and other purveyors of violent crime have been free to do so over the past few years thanks in large part to the Biden-Harris administration’s empowering of George Soros-funded district attorneys across the country.
These prosecutors, which one 2020 Heritage Foundation report referred to as part of the “rogue prosecutor movement,” have helped push soft-on-crime policies in cities all over the U.S.
“[Soros-funded prosecutors] brazenly usurp the constitutional role of the legislative branch by refusing to prosecute entire categories of crime, abuse the role of the county prosecutor, fail to protect victims of crime, and ignore the rising crime rates that flow from their radical policies,” the authors of the report wrote.
A slightly more recent report from the Heritage Foundation revealed exactly how Biden and Harris have helped fund that soft-on-crime approach.
“[Biden] is partnering with and empowering many of those who view our criminal justice system as being systematically racist and who have been working to undermine it by supporting rogue prosecutors around the country — including in places like Chicago and St. Louis where violent crime casualties rival those you would expect to see in a war zone,” the report noted.
When Taxation and Inflation Go Too Far
In “Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II,” reformer John Calvin made clear that “theft” as described in scripture covers so much more than the mere pilfering of personal items.
“God sees the intricate deceptions with which a crafty man sets out to snare one of simpler mind, until he at last draws him into his nets. He sees the hard and inhumane laws with which the more powerful oppress and crush the weaker person … And such injustice occurs not only in matters of money or in merchandise or land, but in the right of each one; for we defraud our neighbors of their property if we repudiate the duties by which we are obligated to them …”
Undoubtedly, two such ways “crafty” men use “laws” to steal from the “weaker person” are through taxation and inflationary spending.
Inflationary spending, as economist Milton Friedman liked to put it, is “taxation without legislation.” It is a means for the government to fill its own coffers while devaluing your own property.
The government simply prints its own money, so it has more to spend, but this increase in the money supply devalues everyone else’s.
The other way men take advantage of the law to steal from others is through taxation.
Pastor Doug Wilson made this case quite succinctly in a 2014 blog post.
“The baseline, the starting point, is that property belongs to the individual. He is the one that Thou shalt not steal applies to. He is the one with the house, the vineyard, the lawn mower, the wallet, the smart phone, and so on. Whenever the Bible talks about property, it always talks about it two categories,” Wilson wrote.
“The first is God’s absolute ownership of all things (Dt. 10:14), and the second is the relative ownership that you and your neighbor enjoy (Dt. 8:18). When we talk about the state possessing things, this possession is derivative. The state extracts value from the taxpayer, the appointed steward of God’s wealth, and this extraction can also be divided into two categories. This value can be extracted lawfully, or the state can play the role of the thief. So how are we to tell the difference?”
Wilson argued that the level of government taxation cannot rival God’s 10 percent tithe, it cannot fund any functions outside of what God has ordained for the government and those taxes must be “lawful and in accordance with the established constitution of the people.”
Now, can this Christian writer tell you exactly where the line is between sinful and just taxation? No, not with complete certainty (though Wilson’s three points of criteria seem a good place to start).
But what he can say is that our current tax system is vastly overly punitive to a sinful degree and is helping fund all sorts of functions not ordained by God.
It’s wrong that your taxes are funding counterproductive welfare programs that keep minorities poor and incentivize poor, single mothers to stay single (see part five of this series).
It’s also wrong that your tax dollars are funding the killing of babies in the womb (see part six).
There are many other great examples of tax financing dubious schemes.
A favorite of this writer comes from a story told by the great conservative economist Thomas Sowell. Sowell — for most of his career a free-market advocate — was actually once a Marxist … until he worked at the U.S. Labor Department.
While there, Sowell discovered that minimum wage laws were hurting the very people they were supposed to help.
Upon bringing this information to his superiors in the government, he was met with indifference.
“It forced me to realize that government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of those for whom a program has been set up,” Sowell wrote, per Reason.
“Administration of the minimum wage law was a major part of the Labor Department’s budget and employed a significant fraction of all the people who worked there. Whether or not minimum wages benefited workers may have been my overriding question, but it was clearly not theirs.”
Essentially, Sowell discovered that many government jobs are predicated on policies remaining in place, even if those policies don’t work.
This keeps the tax dollars flowing their way, employing various departments full of bureaucrats — even if none of them are doing anything to help the taxpayer.
That whole system is wrong, and the extent to which this is happening likely goes much further than just the Labor Department.
The degree to which tax dollars are propping up such departments and funding counterproductive jobs is flat-out theft.
The government wasn’t ordained to reorganize society. It was ordained to punish evil.
Hopefully someday soon it can return to fulfilling that purpose.
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