Forging Our Fetters Link by Link

Health Care Reform is but One Eaxmple of America's Self-Destructive Behavior

Edmund Burke, the brilliant 18th century British author at the time of the American revolution once wrote:

"Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and the appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

The weight and truth of that statement cannot be adequately addressed without the willingness to be honest about the natural state of the human condition, which is to say, men are not inherently good, we are inherently evil. The daily reality of life proves to us beyond all doubt that a man left to his own devices, without internal or external restraint, will default to the most aberrant behavior possible. Anyone who would deny it is not being intellectually honest.

In a nutshell Mr. Burke's statement means the natural man must be restrained from his natural tendency to evil by some sort of control placed on his human appetites. Without that control a society plunges into chaos and anarchy and eventually, self-destruction. Indeed, as Burke stated so profoundly, the less an internal control exists in the hearts and minds of men, the more an external control is required. Any parent knows this to be true.

Consider then, the last sentence of the Burke quote which clearly states that the passions of men forge their fetters. In other words, we create the need for external controls by refusing to control our own passions and lusts from within. Most of those controls come via federal or state governments in the form of lost freedom and liberty, as in the case of the pending health care reform. Today's government health care scheme is nothing more than a power grab by socialists who wish to control every phase of our life, but that power grab is not where the issue began. Instead, it began when the American Christian Church turned its back on the Biblical mandate of charity and benevolence.