The Government Doesn’t Have Money to Give

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With DOGE, USAID, and the Federal bureaucracy, there is lament that precious and well-intentioned programs are being cut. Eighty-three percent of the programs directly funded and administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were canceled Monday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Department of Education has a budget of $238 billion and almost none of it goes to educate anyone. It’s a grant-giving agency. The department currently holds and maintains approximately $1.7 trillion in federal student loan debt.

As a side note, when grants like these are offered, the price of everything goes up. The same is true for loan programs. The Department of Education needs to be on the chopping block because it’s unconstitutional no matter what good it claims to do.

Crossed Fingers

Crossed Fingers is the first book to identify and discuss in detail the five points of liberalism and the rival theological positions. It is also the first published book that “follows the money” by tracing the sources of the funding of theological liberalism in twentieth-century America. One man, more than any other, was the primary source: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. This fully-documented tome is a handbook for the diagnosis and defeat of the same liberal forces that have captured American Christianity.

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No one ever offers bad reasons for a new government agency. Some of what these agencies want to do are good causes but not for $238 billion every year and implemented by government bureaucrats. The warnings about federal government agencies have a long history. “Beginning in 1923,” Gary North writes, “J. Gresham Machen sounded the rallying cry of a frontal assault against a well-entrenched and well-funded enemy: the American Establishment—not just the religious Establishment, which today is a comparatively minor affair in the United States, but the American Establishment in the broadest sense.” Machen (1881-1937) was Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary between 1906 and 1929 and led a revolt against modernist theology at Princeton and helped establish Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia as an orthodox alternative. “Suspicious of his family friend Woodrow Wilson’s project of spreading democracy and of imperialism, he was staunchly opposed to the war, and upon returning to the US, he saw that many of the provisions of, ‘the Treaty of Versailles constituted an attack upon international and interracial peace…. [W]ar will follow upon war in a wearisome progression.’” Historian George Marsden has described Machen as “radically libertarian. He opposed almost any extension of state power and took stands on a variety of issues. Like most libertarians, his stances violated usual categories of liberal or conservative.” North lays out some of Machen’s views relative to social and political themes. Machen was a DOGER long before Trump and Musk:

Machen was a believer in limited civil government, non-intervention in foreign policy (one view he shared with [William Jennings] Bryan), and private charities rather than tax-financed institutions of coercive wealth redistribution. He opposed Prohibition as an unwarranted incursion into people’s freedom of action by the civil government. (Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, 1954), 387.) He testified before a joint Congressional committee in 1926 against the proposed U.S. Department of Education. (Proposed Department of Education, Congress of the United States, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, House Committee on Education (Feb. 25, 1926), 95-108; reprinted in Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, edited by John W. Robbins (Jefferson, Maryland: Trinity Foundation, 1987), ch. 7. Cf. Machen, “Shall We Have a Federal Department of Education?” The Woman Patriot (Feb. 15, 1926); reprinted in Machen, Education, ch. 6.) He opposed the proposed amendment to the Constitution, the child labor amendment of 1935. (Machen, “A Debate About the Child Labor Amendment,” The Banner (Jan. 4, 1935), 15-16.) He opposed military conscription. (Machen, “A Debate About the Child Labor Amendment,” The Banner (Jan. 4, 1935), 15.)

He opposed the New Deal’s Social Security legislation and its anti-gold standard monetary policy, which, he said, undermined contracts. (“Machen to Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” New York Herald Tribune (Oct. 2, 1935); cited in D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 143.) He opposed Bible reading or the teaching of morality in public schools, since he recognized that the teachers were predominantly atheistic, deistic, or liberal in their theological opinions. (Machen, “The Necessity of the Christian School” (1933); reprinted in Machen, Education, ch. 5.) Presumably, he would have opposed prayer in public school classrooms. This was a departure from the opinion held by A. A. Hodge in the 1880’s. (A. A. Hodge, “Religion in the Public Schools,” New Princeton Review, 3 (1887); reprinted in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, 4 (Summer 1977).) Hodge could still claim that the United States was a Christian nation, and that its public schools should reflect this fact. By Machen’s day, such a claim was less believable. But he did not publicly reject tax-financed public education. (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 14.) His Scottish common sense rationalism did allow for some degree of common ground in education, which alone might legitimize tax-funded schools.[1]

As usual, when these unconstitutional and bloated agencies are attacked, the attacks come as if they have always been the foundation of our Republic. The Federal Government should not be in the charity or loan business. The following from Congressman Davy Crockett (1786-1836) is apropos.

There had been a fire in suburban Georgetown during Crockett’s first term in Congress. He was among several congressmen who rushed to the scene, helped to fight the fire, and sought shelter for the victims who were shivering on a cold night. The very next morning Congress appropriated $20,000 for the relief of the fire victims. Crockett spoke in favor. Because there was opposition, the vote on the issue was recorded in the journals of that day’s proceedings and a listing was made of those who voted for and those who voted against the appropriation.

Crockett said that when he went back to his home district to run for re-election he stopped to solicit the vote of a farmer plowing in his field. The man remembered Colonel Crockett, said he had voted for him the first time, but that he would not vote for him again. The farmer had read a newspaper account of that $20,000 gift to victims of the fire. He saw Crockett’s name listed as supporting the measure. The farmer then proceeded to explain to congressman Crockett: “The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be trusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government.

While you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20 million as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and in any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other.

No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in the country as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week’s pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life. The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from necessity of giving what was not yours to give.

The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution. So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you.”[2]

Restoring the Foundation of Civilization

There are many Christians who will not participate in civilization-building efforts that include economics, journalism, politics, education, and science because they believe (or have been taught to believe) these areas of thought are outside the realm of what constitutes a Christian worldview. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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[1] Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Institute for Christian Economic, 1996), ch. 8.

[2] This article is part of an edited compilation by the staff of 101Bananas.com from three different sources: The Life of Colonel David Crockett by Edward S. Ellis (1884); Essays on Liberty, vol. IX, published by The Foundation for Economic Education (1962); and the transcript of an old radio program called Life Line, featuring ‘Freedom Talks’ by commentator Melvin Munn (June 15, 1971).

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources