We are talking about a system of government. No form of government is voluntary. However, it may be democratic.
WHY does God establish government and what does HE (and not men) task it with.
The question is whether the government (whatever its form) governs according to the will of God.
And God only tasks government with wielding the sword against the evil doer and ensuring justice is done for all men.
That is not peculiar to socialism. Many Americans today find the way Congress chooses to spend their taxes foolish, wasteful and harmful to themselves and their fellows.
I am speaking of Godly government, not carnal government.
Given that God commanded the theocratic government of Israel to collect tithes and also commanded that 1/3 of the tithes collected be distributed to the poor of the land, I find your perspective rather difficult to justify.
Did you miss the import of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? I am a Christian under grace, not a Jew under the law.
Just what do you think it means to seek the kingdom of God? It means to see that the commands of God on social order are implemented: commands that clearly demand attention to the needs and rights of the poor by those in authority.
Yet God does not task government to care for the poor. He gives that duty to us as individuals and to the church.
You are creating a straw man to knock down.
What I am knocking down is man disregarding God and creating government that governs in defiance of His will rather than in accordance with it.
I don't know of anything in socialist policy that would put a cap on how much wealth anyone can create, as long as they do no harm in the process.
By what right does government take the bread of ones man labor to give to another man? It certainly doesn't come from God as He says he who does not work, neither shall he eat.
All governments of every stripe make regulations on how businesses are run. After all, if one didn't, there would be no defence against crime-funded businesses.
What scripture gives government this duty? If one initiates the use of force of fraud the government can and should act but when one is doing no such evil why should a third party who has no investment in a businessman's company have a say in how it is run?
And for reasons of health and safety, it is only common-sense to demand that certain standards be kept in such matters as food production, construction and so on.
If a company is engaging in action that is harming others that is the time to act. However if a company is not engaging in harmful action, let the consumer decide if they want to buy that companies goods. The Ford Focus is not as safe as a Volvo XC 90 so should the Focus be banned because it is 'unsafe'?
When governments fund schools they have the right to set the curriculum.
Care to cite that part of the Constitution which says this? For that matter, it is a violation of the free exercise of religion to tell Christian parents (or Muslim or Hindu) that they cannot have their children educated in the wisdom and holiness of God (demented Supreme Court rulings not withstanding). Besides God commands that children be educated in His word so it is absurd to suggest that Godly government can ban His word.
But that doesn't stop a family that disagrees from opting for a private school or for home-schooling, so there is no restriction on how to educate your children.
Why not just return public schools to local control as we used to have it and let the community set the educational agenda for their children?
How can anyone reach their full potential if, due to poverty, they suffered malnutrition during early childhood when their brain was developing? How can anyone reach their full potential when their parents have to work 2-3 jobs and have no time to see to their social, mental and spiritual development? How can anyone reach their full potential when they are denied a living wage for their labour?
Guess what? Before the advent of government welfare and entitlement programs and the huge taxes required to sustain them what you describe here was not as big a problem. There was a time when the men worked and the mothers tended to the children.
And I think you and Leap need to chat with one another. Here you are going on about what sounds like the very avarice he condemns.
How does a non-socialist government see to it that people are not deprived of fulfilling their potential by the impact of extreme poverty?
It is not the duty of government to see to it that people are not deprived of fulfilling their potential by the impact of extreme poverty. Besides not being tasked by God to do so, government does not create wealth and every penny that it spends must first come OUT of the private sector. This means the parents of children and all those who are seeking to increase their wealth must of necessity have LESS money to take care of their needs. There is no contest between the wealth creating ability of capitalism and socialism ... capitalism wins hand down in creating wealth and raising the standard of living for more people.
You have obviously not studied the views and philosophy of Christian socialism. So you have no basis on which to say it is not true.
I have studied the Bible so I DO have a basis on which to say it is not true. Christian (government) socialism is an oxymoron.
And others do not have a right to the goods and persons of the poor.
This is what Jesus and the prophets before him, and the law of Moses, and the admonishments to kings and other authorities in scripture are about.
Consider what Jesus says of the scribes in Luke 20:47 or how he condemns the practice of the Pharisees and lawyers in Luke 11:42 & 46 or again in Matthew 15:5-7.
Jesus is not talking about giving the poor a right to another's goods, but about restoring their own goods to them which have been taken away by the force of abusive power---much as many Americans in these last few years have seen their homes and savings taken away from them by the fraudulent practices of the rich.
Or as one mother on welfare once told us: "I don't want your money. But I want to keep what I have earned." (She was speaking of how so much is deducted from her welfare cheque when she works that it isn't worth it to work. But, like most people on assistance, she wants to work, she wants to support herself. She wants to live with the dignity of financial independence.)
When empires of wealth are founded on the oppression and exploitation of the poor, they are not legitimate and the poor have the right to take back what was stolen from them through injustice--including legalized injustice.
The kind of exploitation you speak of is not possible when people have the limited government that God commands and the freedom to pursue their dreams without the arbitrary interference of third parties that comes from government intervention into the economy. And in case you haven't noticed, we Christians do not answer evil with evil. We may suffer ourselves at the evil that others do but we DO NOT answer that evil by doing evil ourselves. Just because an employer may seek to exploit workers by offering pay lower than what their work merits does not give us a right to impose a minimum wage on all employers because of the evil of the one ... the free market corrects this kind of situation anyway (I hope you do understand how the free market works and that exploitation cannot last for long UNLESS it has government protection as is often the case).
It is a category mistake to confuse socialist government policies with charity. Socialism is not about charity. It is about justice--especially the protection of the poor from the depredations of the wealthy.
Are you claiming socialism does this by going to court against the accused wealthy exploiter? Funny, I thought socialism just confiscated the money via taxation with no concern whatsoever if the taxed is guilty of wrong doing or not.
It is about protecting the right of the poor to have a home and food on the table either though a decently-paying job
NO ONE has an inherent right to the wealth or labor of their fellow man (again, the charity that Jesus preached is something different). For the things we need we are told to look to the kingdom of God AND HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS and then they will be added to us and warned to "put not your trust in princes (ie government), nor in the son of man in whom there is no help" ... so why do you advocate for what God tells us NOT TO DO and ignore what God DOES tell us to do?
or, if necessary, through public assistance. It is about protecting the right of the poor to improve themselves through freely-available education.
If you want to become a teacher and teach the children of the poor for free have at it and God bless you. If however you want to compel others to fund education they find badly run and failing in its duties (like teaching the wisdom and holiness of God), YOU HAVE NO MORAL RIGHT TO DO THIS. God HATES a false balance and that is exactly what you engage in when you force people to fund such schemes.
It is about protecting the right of the poor to prosecute a slum landlord who doesn't maintain the property.
There are lawyers and organizations who assist in this sort of thing of their own free will. This is a case where the landlord does have responsibilities under contract with the tenant and one of the duties of government per God is ensuring justice is done.
It is about protecting the right of the poor to be treated with dignity no matter what their gender, skin colour, age, or national origin.
Just what does this mean? For example, if I'm a Christian who owns an apartment complex and I refuse to rent to unmarried couples who want to live together is sin, am I violating their 'right' to be treated with dignity?
The bible doesn't speak of the middle-class because no middle-class as such existed in ancient times, but much that it says about protecting the rights of the poor can apply to the middle-class as well. So we can include such things as protecting a prosperous middle-class town from invasion by a corporation which runs their businesses into bankruptcy.
So if consumers decide to take their patronage to the corporation rather than stay with the mom and pop stores, are you saying they are violating the rights of the small business owners? Please explain this fascinating bit of reasoning.
Or fouls their water-supply with fracking. Or destroys their livelihoods (as many along the Gulf coast have experienced) with major oil spills and little to no compensation.
This is why we have courts and the right to sue such companies.
These things are not matters of charity; they are matters of justice, and a responsibility of governing authorities which they ignore at the peril of God's judgment on them and their nation.
Is a minimum wage just?
Is mandatory union membership just?
Is government mandating companies provide family leave, free birth control or spousal benefits (even when the 'spouse' is a member of the same sex in violation of God's law) just?
Is government breaking up 'monopolies' who gained their large market share by providing excellent goods and services at prices that led consumers to flock to them just?
Again, you set up a straw man. What you are describing has nothing to do with socialism.
Socialism is more about the poor man being able to keep his own bread and not have to fork it over to the rich in order to pay his rent or purchase needed medicine. It is about making sure the poor man gets paid enough for his labour that he can purchase bread in the first place. And pay his rent and get what health care he needs. And send his children to school and get shoes for them to wear.
That is the sort of justice socialism is about.
NO, what you are speaking of is what YOU consider just and forcing those who may disagree with your sense of justice to none-the-less be compelled by the government to do as you think wise. This is an utter violation of Jesus' 2nd great command to love your neighbor as you yourself (which includes not coveting the property of your neighbor and certainly never stealing that property).
And it is not inconsistent with capitalism either.
Liberty and coercion are opposites, not compatible buddies.
You can have a country in which wealth is generated by capital enterprises that also attends to the needs and rights of the poor as commanded in scripture.
True but you won't have such a country when you expand government beyond its duty of protecting people from the predatory man (wielding the sword against the evil doer) and ensuring justice is done. Instead what you create is a mechanism where one group of people can legally exploit another group and that ALWAYS leads to disaster.
