It is wrong to use political power to take advantage of others. The less power politicians have, the fairer things tend to be. As any society coalesces and grows, those who want to take advantage of their neighbors are quick to organize and legislate their desired advantages into enforceable law.
Every group, from peanut farmers eliminating competition with government-controlled Market Orders to sugar producers making cheaper sugar illegal to obtain, that bases their wealth on government legislation has to be continually, and increasingly, involved in controlling elections.
Soon, combines of special interests are able to keep enough legislators in office to paralyze their competition. When too many segments of an economy come under the control of bribers, the cost of living goes up. That causes more groups to coalesce in groups of bribers who swing financial support to their members. The process is utterly corrupt. When the nation spends so much money on bribes that there’s nothing left for defense, it wanes.
The Soviet Union was taken over by anti-freedom, anti-intellectual, anti-rational, anti-God forces in a few years. It has taken the United States a couple of centuries for the advantage-takers to approach a state of similar, Cuba-like poverty and paralysis.
We see death and doom all around. Babies are being aborted. Our families are being destroyed. Our economies are being devastated. Lies abound. The very groups who claim to be protecting us are the first pick our pockets.
What are we, as Catholics, to do? We must understand that “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.” It is His plan that those who have set evil wheels in motion must invariably end up being crushed by them. One of our duties is to simply stay out of their way. And, we should have more children, whom we raise in The Faith.
When we see ourselves becoming angry at the number of corrupt people and institutions, we are right in one sense, wrong in another. We are right because we recognize corruption and its evil influence. We are wrong because all that which is evil exists only to destroy those who do evil. We do what we can, study, pray and protest. When we complain too much, obsess excessively about evils, or want to “fix things”, we may actually be undermining The Loving Programmer and the way He has written The Creation Program.
As the Books of the Maccabees (removed from the Protestant Bibles by Martin Luther, whose sponsors in German principalities didn’t want to encourage revolutions) show, there is sometimes a need for more direct action. If the Pope should “call the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross”, we should take our weapons from the wall.
What should those weapons be? According to Luke, 22:36-38, Christ, Himself, told us that at least a sixth of us should have a sword. That’s a word that should be considered in light of modern technology.
