Thou shall not steal

The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.

~ Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)

The eighth commandment, “Thou shall not steal,” is God’s call to justice and honesty. This commandment mandates both respect for the rights of others, especially when they get in the way of what we desire, as well as a loyalty to the rule of law, fairness and a willingness to endure loss rather than depriving another.

Regarding America’s tragic love affair with socialism, which in my opinion is legalized stealing, Economist M. Stanton Evans writes:

The principle beneficiaries of the money absorbed and dispensed by government are not poor blacks in ghettos or Appalachian whites or elderly pensioners receiving Social Security checks. … The major beneficiaries, instead, are the employees of government itself – people engaged in administering some real or imagined service to the underprivileged or, as the case may be, the overprivileged. … The gross effect of increased government spending is to transfer money away from relatively low-income people – average taxpayers who must pay the bills – to relatively high-income people – federal functionaries who are being paid out of the taxpayer’s pocket.

Exhibit 1: President Barack Obama. A few weeks ago when our president bowed before the king of Saudi Arabia, there was outrage both in England and here in America. Few of the news reports mentioned that a possible reason for Obama’s prostrating himself before the Saudi king was because he is a closet Muslim, or that Obama received hundreds of millions in campaign contributions from Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Hamas in Gaza, some of which were illegally bundled together to avoid compliance with federal campaign finance laws.

Obama is perhaps the most unabashed socialist in the history of the U.S. presidency. He got to where he is by strictly following one credo: Your liberty, your money and your property all belongs to the government. Why? Economist Evans answers this pivotal question in part when he wrote: “The principle beneficiaries of the money absorbed and dispensed by government are not poor blacks in ghettos or Appalachian whites or elderly pensioners receiving Social Security checks … [but] relatively high income people – federal functionaries who are being paid out of the taxpayer’s pocket.”

Tired of keeping quiet about increasing government redistribution? Express yourself with the magnetic message: “No Hope in Socialism”

In other words, Obama’s neo-Marxism is a systematic, comprehensive grand strategy to destroy the moral, economic and intellectual foundations of America. Every speech, every domestic policy, every foreign policy, every executive order and every political appointee are designed for a singular, diabolical result I called in an earlier article: the Democrat Eternity Act (DEA). If Obama’s is successful with his nefarious plan to transform the Republican Party into the Whig Party of the 21st century, then by attrition this will make the Democrats become the de facto party of America for the next 100 years.

Beginning around the passage of the 16th Amendment (1913), which allowed the government to collect income taxes, America has been on the road to socialism where, except for a few years here and there, the government has taken more of your money, property and liberty in the name of the “common good.” The only entity this is good for is leviathan government, as its power only grows exponentially concurrent with our liberty, freedoms and natural rights diminishing exponentially.

The Bible has a strong prohibition against taking the money or property of another, and this precept has been codified into federal, state and local statues going back long before the founding of America, to the Common Law of England and to the Natural Law of the ancient Greeks and Roman philosophers, as well as the Higher Law of the ancient Israelites; that said, why would we in the 21st century embrace a political philosophy like Obama’s neo-Marxism? A philosophy that so brazenly takes money from Group A (producers) and gives it to Group B (takers). This is legalized thievery writ large, a tragic violation enshrined in public policy and a gross violation of God’s eighth commandment, “Thou shall not steal.”

Grandpa Simpson, the senior citizen from the cartoon TV show “The Simpsons” had a singular statement of fact regarding the thievery and hypocrisy of socialism or the idea that government will take care of you from cradle to grave. Regarding his Social Security, Medicare and free prescription drug allowances, Grandpa Simpson said, “I didn’t earn it, I don’t deserve it, but if the government misses one of my payments, I’ll raise hell!” While I appreciate Grandpa Simpson’s honesty about his dishonesty, there is a part of me that resents the fact that we are living in perverted times where America’s once vaunted, storied, free-market capitalist system is being replaced by a diabolical economic system of legalized thievery called socialism.

Thou shall not steal: four simple but profound words that most people either cannot keep or will not keep. Either way, I argue here that the world would be a much better, more tolerable place to live if our existential way of life would follow this biblical aphorism as well as the words of the prophet Micah, who said, “But they shall sit every man under his [own] vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.”

The choice is simple, dear reader: Will we keep electing presidents, politicians and judges that are ignorant of or hostile to the original intent of the Constitution’s framers, or will America have a real revolution of the mind, body, spirit and nation to reconnect our laws with the immutable precepts of the Bible?

I pray that we choose the latter, for if we follow our current path under the neo-Marxist Obama, then in the words of that great French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville might come to pass: “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.”

I choose to follow God. Thou shall not steal.

Ellis Washington, currently a professor of law and political science at Savannah State University, former editor at the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

Link to this page