The American Penchant for Saving Peoples

Saving peoples is something I think all Americans agree upon, but is it right? Genocide is the great wrong now at the United Nations, but in the OT it was the norm. The Jews were SUPPOSED to wipe out the Canaanites because they had weird gods. They had temple prostitutes. Everything they believed was upside down. So the Jews were supposed to kill them. Instead, as with Samson, they often married them, because they thought they were cute as buttons.

If people have a weird god or set of gods, should we save them? I think we should only save other Protestants.

I'm not against saving per se. I do believe that everyone should have a savings account, and that this should begin in childhood with piggy banks.

Of course the communist left will want to smash the piggy bank, and spend it on some pork program.

But the Dems (communists) always want government to spend, spend, spend. They want to save everybody through bailouts. Not just banks and other businesses too big to fail, but whole genders, whole races, whole classes. Everybody must be saved: even non-sustainable species like the mountain gorilla.

They point to the Good Samaritan as the principle behind this. But the GS was a businessman who used his own money to save a single person. He wasn't the government. He could do what he wanted with his money. He had earned it.

The Dems want professional Good Samaritans to get to play the role of savior with other people's money. This isn't structurally sustainable, and so then we are supposed to save the saviors with even more bailout money (save their jobs). The Republicans want to put individuals back in control of their own lives: get the government out of the role of savior (although they do think the police and military are a pretty good idea).

How did America become such a believer in saviors?

We had the Civil War, and still pat ourselves on the backs for saving the slaves. We build statues of Lincoln, and everybody agrees he was a pretty good guy. He took a bullet in the head for the good and proper.

The Lone Ranger, Batman, Superman, Spiderman. Wonder Woman. To some extent these mythical creatures have grown out of the chivalry model. To some extent that has come out of the Good Samaritan. The problem of good works, preservation commissions, do-gooders, art and beauty, etc., haunt America, because of a misunderstanding of the GS parable, and a too widely applied version of it. It's at most about a single businessman who saved one single person, one time. It isn't meant to become what we do all day and night.

At this point the government is sinking into a quagmire of debt as we try to help the Afghans and the Iraqis, and we tell ourselves now that it's their women we're saving in the name of Universal Human Rights. How imperialist is it to tell a religion how to treat the other gender? Whose agenda is this? Is it at bottom a Protestant pushiness behind this pact? In most of the mainline Protestant faiths women can now pastor. And yet, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, they weren't even permitted to read. The penalty for girls caught learning to read was death. We see the inability to read as a kind of slavery.

In the OT we would see this as a problem with their gods, or god. And simply destroy them. Today, it's a sign of election if instead we want to help them. But can we help the Afghans and the Iraqis without destroying their religion?

These conversations about conservation versus "progress" haunt America. We have the completely down to earth viewpoint of Ron Paul: we don't have the money. We have the mysterious viewpoint of BO: who seems very nice until his commandos land on your doorstep or his drones take out your village.

We have a savior complex but there is a dark side to this. Batman could kill people, as did Superman. Lincoln killed a whole lot of people (just thought I'd get GM going again). To save people you often have to kill others. In the old chivalry stories there was always a dragon or an ogre that needed killing. Substitute Qaddafi, and you have the picture.

I think to the extent possible we ought to try to inculcate in others a sense of the Protestant work ethic. We ought to remember the story: give a man a fish, and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, and he can feed himself for the rest of his life. The parable of the talents can be used as an appendix. Teach a man to fish using his own aptitudes. Teach women, too.

Calvinists thought wealth was a sign of election whereas communists see it as theft, and want to appropriate and demand reparations for whoever the wealth was stolen from. So if you set up a company and get a thousand people on the payroll the Democrats want to legislate how you have to give them insurance, and how you have to treat them, often down to the finest detail. To some extent this is good, but it can go too far until the government becomes a bully and nobody wants to run a business.

Elections turn on this distinction, and the ability of voters to discriminate between the paradigm of property as theft, and property as election. Setting people on their own two feet is difficult. It is the job of parenting, and parents aren't supposed to give up.

But when it's other people's kids, it's easier to stop. Instead of exacting gratitude by giving them checks in exchange for votes, we ought to see ourselves as getting individuals in charge of their lives. Those who won't or can't probably have the wrong gods or the wrong values. To heck with them.

"The business of America is business," as Calvinist Coolidge put it. Let people start their own businesses and use their own sense of how it should be done. Let evolution follow. A mean employer will lose employees and lose business. A mean country will stagnate, and its people will suffer, and attempt to emigrate. Situations right themselves. If government bullies businesses, they will take their business overseas.

To correct this, it is perhaps time to think about making laws that America should only help Protestant countries like Norway and Sweden and Finland. We should also only do business with such countries. All other countries suck.

We should see a valid Protestant business as being as important as an art work, and should try to buy their stuff, instead of stuff made by criminals. We should see a solid Protestant business as a good work, in James' sense. It's the most important component of America. Our Protestant entrepreneurs are our most important group. Government should spend its dime helping Protestant entrepreneurs: educating them, and getting them going, and keeping parasites (thieves) and every kind of non-Protestant off of them so they can prosper. But I guess this might violate the Establishment Clause.