The following contains an excerpt from a speech given by theologian John Robbins, in a debate with C. Everett Koop, during the Clintonian attempt to nationalize healthcare in the early 1990’s.
Dr. C. Everett Koop, who will be our featured speaker this evening, has challenged everyone to debate political health care, and I rise to accept his challenge. Dr. Koop supports the President’s Health Security Plan. In his advocacy of politicized medicine, Dr. Koop has written:
Before we can enact the sweeping reform that I think must take place, I think we have to agree on the basic values and ethics upon which our health care system, and our whole society, indeed, is based and from which we draw our moral power. I am convinced that if we could reach an ethical consensus, many of the economic and political problems would fall into place rather easily.(2)
In focusing first on ethics, Dr. Koop has correctly re-cognized the more important part of the health care debate. Economics is at best secondary, and I shall discuss it in second place. Ethics is of greater importance. Theology is of first importance.
Now what precisely are those basic values and ethics upon which our “whole society is based and from which we draw our moral power?” Certainly the single most important moral value – the moral value that has given the United States whatever moral authority it has had and still has in the world, the moral value which has attracted tens of millions to our shores and created the most humane society of modern times – is individual liberty. Individual liberty logically and historically depends on several other values, among which are the following:
1. The sovereignty of God. In political terms this means that God – not the state, society, race, class, Volk, or church – is the source of security. The modern idolatry of state and politics, for which the economist Ludwig von Mises coined the word “statolatry,” is the cause of the horrific government- caused suffering that has afflicted the modern world, making the twentieth century the bloodiest century in the Christian era. The medieval idolatry of the church, ecclesiolatry, is responsible for most of the suffering and persecution of Christians during the Middle Ages.
2. Limited government. The sovereignty of God entails the limited power and authority of all human institutions. The Constitution of the United States created a government of enumerated and limited powers. Within that government, there is a separation of powers, so that no man or department exercises all the power of even a limited government. Only God, not men, is to be trusted with power. A night-watchman state, such as that suggested by the Apostle Paul in Romans 13, is a basic moral value of American society.
3. The primacy of the individual. The importance of the individual – rooted in the Reformation’s recovery of the Bible’s doctrines of individual election, individual regeneration, individual justification, individual sanctification, individual responsibility before God at the final judgment, personal immortality in Heaven (or Hell), justification by belief alone, and the priesthood of all believers – is a basic value of American society. From it are derived all the various individual freedoms and protections we enjoy: religion, press, speech, association, privacy, private arms, no self-incrimination, trial by jury, no double jeopardy, and freedom of contract.
4. Private property. The mention of freedom of contract calls to mind the idea of private property. No one can seriously deny that private property is one of the basic values of both the Bible and American society. It has been under heavy attack in the twentieth century by atavistic and criminal collectivists who wish either to abolish it or to redistribute it by political means. “Thou shalt not steal” applies to all, both rulers and private citizens. Rulers routinely violate the commandment by taxation, expropriation, and inflation.
5. The Protestant work ethic. What Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic is itself a bundle of economic virtues: Honesty, punctuality, diligence, obedience to the Fourth Commandment – six days you shall labor; obedience to the Eighth Commandment, you shall not steal; and obedience to the Tenth Commandment, you shall not covet. A recognition of the significance of productive work as glorifying God grew out of the Bible and the Reformation.
6. Individual responsibility. The Bible clearly makes each man responsible for himself, both in this world and the world to come. In economics, Paul says that he who will not work shall not eat. Paul recognized no entitlement to the property of another based on need.
7. Generosity. Perhaps no people has been as generous to those unable to help themselves as Americans. This is a consequence of two factors: Christianity and capitalism. But compassion, generosity, and capitalism have been under attack throughout the twentieth century by those who wish to substitute envy and compulsion. Compulsory charity is, of course, a contradiction in terms.
8. The rule of law. The rule of law, based upon legal principles found in the Bible, includes three major ideas: (1) that settled law, not executive decrees, regulations, or ordinances, is the only proper guide for social conduct; (2) that laws must be both clear and non-absurd, that is, capable of being understood by all and non-contradictory; and (3) that the laws apply equally to all, including rulers.
9. Federalism. Modeled on Presbyterian church government, the federal system is a system in which no government has a monopoly of jurisdiction. This division of powers, like the separation of powers, is designed to fragment political power so that it cannot threaten the lives, liberties, and property of the people.
10. Republicanism. Republicanism entails not only the idea of limited government, but the notion that monarchies are not proper forms of human government, that they are in fact rejections of divine kingship, and that proper human governments are elected by the people. It was not only the nation of Israel that sinned by asking for a king, but pagan nations around them and throughout history have sinned that way as well.
These are the moral values of America, which have given America whatever moral power and authority it has enjoyed and still enjoys in the world. If we subvert or abandon these values, we will have lost both our moral power and our society. National health care, such as that proposed by the Clintons and Dr. Koop, opposes and subverts every one of these moral values.
You can read the speech in its entirety at http://www.trinityfoundation.org/latest.php
