From colsoncenter.org
… It is easy to blame government for encroaching on areas that are not part of its proper responsibilities. Constitutional conservatives will frequently cite the Tenth Amendment and the enumerated powers clause to attack the government for overreaching. And they do have a point.
But the root of the problem isn’t government. It’s the now reflexive habit of our culture to identify freedom with license, not liberty, and the resulting moral and ethical failures that have gradually become the norm in all too many spheres of life. Without those ethical failures, government encroachment would not have been seen as necessary or desirable.
If we want to preserve our liberty, we need to recover the autonomy of the various spheres, recognizing that only Jesus is Lord over all of life, not the state. But if that is going to happen, we also need to recognize that the problem is the lack of ethical training and behavior in ourselves and in our society.
This is a tall order. As David Brooks points out in a recent column, we have raised a generation of people who do not even have the vocabulary to talk about right and wrong.
When a newspaper asked readers to submit answers to the question, “What is wrong with the world,” G. K. Chesterton is reported to have sent in the response, “I am.” Unless we recognize that the problem isn’t “them,” whether Wall Street, big banks, labor unions, or the government, but “us,” unless we recover a solid ethical foundation for society, our problems are only going to get worse.
And that will result in liberty becoming an increasingly distant memory.
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