The Modern State, a False God

(W)ithout a sound faith, men will trust almost anything and anyone rather than God. Having denied God, men will then proceed to deify themselves, their own creations (including the state) and almost anything other than the living God (Rom. 1:18-23). Chief among these man-made idols or gods is the state. As St. Augustine pointed out, in The City of God, when men forsake God, and when a civil order becomes godless, it is soon no more than a larger band of thieves, a super-mafia, whose victims are the citizens. This evil situation is compounded by the fact that the people insist on trusting this false god, the idol state. The more it oppresses them, the more they turn on state-created scapegoats, and each of them in turn becomes a scapegoat. But this is not all: to relieve themselves of a state-created oppression, they vote still greater powers to the state, crying in effect, "O Baal, hear us" and save us (I Kings 18:26).

As we view the modern state, it is important to recognize one central fact: the major enemy of the humanistic state is its own people. The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. have their differences, and they may go to war, but both have been in continuous war against their own peoples from 1918 to the present. Savage as the treatment by the U.S.S.R. of Germany was, after World War II, it never equalled its savagery towards its own peoples. The U.S.A. has been generous to its enemies, and to all the world, except its own people. In the name of the public welfare, it has robbed, abused, and mistreated its own citizenry, and it is waging war against all segments of society, behind a facade of subsidies, and, with President Carter, began a war against Christianity as well.

People should have been forewarned. Early in the modern era, city planners, as soon as they came into existence, began to think of straight streets, not for the convenience of the public, but for the control of the people. An angry populace could be handled more easily by cannons shooting down straight streets, and rebellious peoples could be easily subdued by a cavalry charge up and down a straight street.

The first principle of the modern state is to protect itself against its own people, and to control them. Its second and lesser principle is to protect itself against foreign enemies. Foreign enemies are a periodic problem; the people are a state's permanent problem.

Thus, to entrust the state to control our lives, our families, our education, religion, and economics is to ask for our destruction.

The goal of state-controlled economics is the increase of statist powers, and the control of money is basic to that goal. To trust the state with money is to ensure, virtually always in history, the debauchery of money.

--Rousas John Rushdooney, The Roots of Inflation, pp. 41-42 (1982)