Should the Government Intervene or not?
Should the Government Intervene or not?
Almost all politics and economics can be defined by your answer to one question. This question technically supersedes the political party level. Unfortunately, the Democrats and Republicans are not fully one or the other. This is what former Republican Senator Ron Paul (beloved limited Gov. proponent) once said in an interview with Patrick Bet David (PBD) on his multi-million-subscriber YouTube Channel when he was asked if he identified more as a Republican or Democrat. Ron responded by saying, “I do not think about it in those categories, I think about politics in the categories of Interventionist and Non-Interventionist.” Thus, the stage has been set for our question to intervene or not to intervene. I do not seek to deal with every case of whether to intervene or not. I want to help make you aware of these categories so that you will not be caught in the tribal partisan trap of group thought, but instead, seek the underlying principles underneath it all. This will allow you to detach yourself from wanting to be committed to a pre-established system and instead think through issues on their own merit. Here at Labor For Truth, we do not talk on a political party level but instead, we discuss on a more generic political theory level, like Ron Paul, because that’s where the true work of politics is done.
We might say that a particular party happens to hold a particular belief, but we merely see it as a way to catalog who believes what. In many ways, I think about it like the conversation as to whether something is legal as a state of reality now and the more theoretical and hypothetical thought process as to why it became law in the first place and whether it even should have become law. A well-known economist and economics professor once said, “However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.’’
To me, the passionate analysis would be to defend a law as being good without really thinking about it or affirming your favored political party’s stance on an issue without deep objective thinking, or as Walter Williams calls it “dispassionate analysis!” My mom once told me that I had to wear my seatbelt when I drove, and I asked her why she thought I should do that, and she said that it was because of the law. Unfortunately, that is sloppy circular reasoning. I asked her to persuade me why the government should intervene through coercion and threat to make me wear my seatbelt because the only reason that a law is passed is that people are not persuaded to do it, so the government tries to force them. Instead, she said past coercion is assumed as justification to keep coercing. Instead, she could have told me that it is safer for me to wear my seat belt instead of getting projected out of my car, so the government is trying to protect my life against my ignorance of the harm I can do to myself. That might not make me want to wear my seatbelt, but it is more effective than the circular argument of “coercion begets coercion” because it is built on coercion but was gained through scientific dispassionate evidently based analysis about what is safer for a person in a car in the event of a car crash.
So also thinking on the level of the general philosophical schools of thought that are juxtaposed to each other, aka one is the antithesis of the other, helps to get out of the prior commitments that parties try to impose on us. I remember that when I first got into thinking about politics, I had a heritage of Republicanism from those around me, like my dad, especially, and all the adults at the Seminary where I got My Bachelor in Bible at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth Tx. These men were PhDs in Theology, but the debate was could such an immoral man personally, Trump, be what the Southern Baptist stand for since he was pro-life. For such astute men of God’s word, I was surprised that all the debate over this candidate was whether his personal life should hinder him from being someone the church could support. I’m not against considering this, but there should have been much more political and economic probing into what Trump would actually do as President, not whether he is having sex with someone or not. I realized with another libertarian Christian that Edmund Opitz that these men knew nothing of the things we discussed here at Labor For Truth. So people graduate from there, knowing just as little about politics and economics, even though these people are going into ministry to train their people above God’s book and in light of that how to live in God’s world without really being schooled in the underlying schools of thought.
So let us attempt to do this level of thinking. I cannot tell you that you lack understanding of a subject and then proceed to leave you in the dark. I would be worse than the other teachers that ignorantly did not teach you what they did not know themselves. When it comes to ways of thinking, especially one is the not or anti version, I live to start off with the question, which position is the assumed or default, and which one has the burden of proof to dismount or knock off the default of the two? In this case, I would say that unless you are a proponent of communism, which is as Interventionist as it gets, then the default is non-interventionism. What I mean is unless you’re for total government control of our lives, as communism is, then the burden of proof should always be why must the government be involved? Areas that government could potentially try and regulate or control are:
1. Foreign relationships between companies.
2. How domestic companies are run.
3. How parents ran their families.
4. How religious institutions operate.
5. What substances I possess and put in my body.
6. Where I spend my money.
7. What companies will be successful?
8. How much money banks have and their interest rates.
9. Who I choose to have relationships with.
10. Who can share their thoughts and what kinds of thoughts are shareable?
These are not all the areas but are major areas that affect our day -to-day life. The main job of the government is to create law and order, or in the language of the Bible, to be a minister of God’s wrath against those who would do evil against the good ones in a society. So we must ask why is it the job of the government to do all that other stuff?
A great example that I ran into on this was a typically conservative commentator, who claims to be a libertarian. Ben Shapiro did a podcast about how America had a baby formula shortage (in 2022). The thing that knocked me off my rocker was in his commentary on the issue, when he literally said that it was President Joe Biden’s job to personally fix the formula issue. To add insult to injury, the administration at the time came out and said that people should be looking to their local pediatric doctor to figure out how to feed their child. Just think about that for a minute. Ben dethroned the doctor of children as the free market shortage answer and instead said that Joe Biden should be solving this problem instead of them. In what way in the world is the President of the United States purview to solve such a specific specialized supply issue? This is a prime example of interventionism vs. non-interventionism. Joe Biden solving the problem would be government interventionism and having the pediatricians solve the issue within their local client base of parents is exactly the non-interventionist, free market solution that should be the default.
If Joe Biden and the government are better at keeping babies alive than people who study babies and practice keeping babies healthy every day, then the whole world is in trouble. Instead, Ben and us should say, “What a breath of fresh air! The government is finally limiting its scope in where it is intervening and instead allowing for those who have special knowledge and whose livelihood depends on their ability to solve these issues actually being the solution to what their legitimate role in society is.” This is what I mean by defaulting to those who have special knowledge instead of those who have political power but no special knowledge like those in that industry day to day. A conversation that I think perfectly summarizes this conversation is one between Margaret Thatcher (former Prime Minister of Britain) and Mikhail Gorbachev (Russian leader who was her contemporary). Mik asked Margaret, “How do you feed your own people?” Margaret responded, “I don’t” Mik is someone thinking, like Ben Shapiro unfortunately, that is for some reason the government’s job to feed its people, as if the government produces anything food of its own, has any money it did not steal, and has any clue how much of any given food should be made to feed all those people beforehand.
On the other hand, Margaret represents the default, which is what the Biden administration was appealing to, that it is not the role of government to feed its people but instead spontaneous order (people due to their own self-interest to serve their own needs will produce something of value so that they can take care of themselves spontaneously instead of contrived government order from the top down to figure out all the billions of things to produce any given thing). To put it into perspective, interventionism taken to its logical conclusion would amount to what happened to the Russian government when they had to decide how much of 24 million different things to produce! In a more complex economy like China, India, and America, it might be in the hundreds of millions of things to have to decide for. It especially gets complicated for things that are perishable (have a limited window of consumption) before needing to be discarded that are foundational for being the building blocks in multiple things. My favorite example is milk. It can be consumed on its own, but it is also in things like yogurt and ice cream.
In summary, to really come to informed conclusions that are sustainable and consistent, we need to:
1. Get out of thinking from the political party level and instead, table notes from Ron Paul and See the Politico-Economic world from the Bigger Birds Eye of Interventions and non-interventionists.
2. Start with the default that somebody other than the government can solve all issues better than the government and then try and have a case to dethrone that assumption.
3. In order to reach truly helpful conclusions, we must do dispassionate analysis instead of based compassionate reassuring analysis in order to be truly maximally impactful and helpful to our fellow man.
4. Do our homework on the truth of something and not depend on supposedly informed people to teach us.
In that, we can always have what 3:15 says, “Always be ready to give an answer to the hope that is in you.” (I personally gained all the knowledge I have about business, Apologetics, philosophy, history, economics, theology, and politics because I took it on myself to search it out. I did not need anyone to mentor me or show me because I never wanted to be limited to one person’s knowledge and perspective). The man mentioned earlier, who at first thought the theological institutions were intentionally trying to avoid talking about politics but realized the thinkers were not oppressive of these ideas but instead realized they were ignorant, said:
“When one sees a caricature of this philosophy (he is referring to classical liberalism, which is seen as the prototypical school of thought to Libertarianism) kicked around, and the real thing never mentioned is that knowledge of it is deliberately kept from students. Experience has taught me otherwise. After perusing the books of the social gospelers and the welfare states, and after conversations with you and with men professionally engaged in one or the other of the various church councils for social action, I am forced to conclude that the reason why the libertarian case (when I would tie into this conversation and say why people do not typically really talk and think in the addressed categories of interventionism and non-interventionism is the same reason he gives is not taught in Seminaries (nor is it taught in public colleges, met a girl in a main college that was studying political science and they barely even brought up libertarian philosophy, even though it is the biggest political party outside of the Big two, namely Democratic and Republican parties) is not known in theological Circles! Neither is it a fashionable mode of thought among our intelligentsia, the climate of opinion is unfavorable to it. There are reasons for this state of affairs, and I hope we may sometime have occasion to explore them together.” -Edmund Opitz in The libertarian Theology of freedom, pg 25.
Labor for Truth, in many ways, is in the legacy of Christian Libertarian thinkers like Edmund Opitz in their desire to explore the reasons for the state of affairs we currently find ourselves in because, as Ron Paul says in his book on Ending the Federal Reserve, “the American people DESERVE to know.”
Tim is a Christian author. His worldview that informs his writing is Calvinist, Baptist, and Libertarian. His main series is his Christian picture book series, “About God for Kids”, where he discusses the attributes of God in a way kids can digest. He also wrote a Christian Romance novel, libertarian book for beginners, and Christian coloring books. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in Biblical Studies from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
You can find his works at his amazon author page,
https://amazon.com/author/timbankes
There is a ton of free books at his author page. Also If you are into Christian Fiction, he has made his first book in his Futuristic Christian Fiction series free, Her Dying Wish
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