Mention the words natural law and what image does the mind conjure up? Say natural law and the brain might create for you and image of airheads living in communes preaching agape love. As a teacher of natural law, I treat the subject quite differently. Make an observation of a principle that works over and over again over all of history’s long timeline. Then, even with all of the effort in the world, folks can’t come up with a universally accepted, or even a good guess as to why it works. The cause is often unexplainable or elusive and not concrete at best.
Much of natural law is well known. When that is the case it is largely treated as a platitude. Reliable principles of natural law are modeled all over the scriptures of every religion. Even with all of the exposure, natural law is treated as mush within intellectual communities. Anyone who alludes to natural law is tuned out. That is a mistake. Natural law dominates man made theories. Man made theories often work perfectly until they conflict with a natural law.
A time honored principle of natural law is that an action that begins with an immoral act will be one where the costs outweigh the benefits. There will be an eventual negative outcome. Is that true? It can’t be proven but we can see that historically it hasn’t failed.
When looking at modern monetary policy. The reasoning is that if we steal on behalf of the rest of the country, the interest Grannie should rightly earn on her savings, and give it to the world’s financial sector, the country as a whole will prosper.
To do what is ostensibly right for the rest of the country, we must rob Grannie. Because that is an immoral approach to public policy, even though the logic sounds great, the whole country will be compromised. The sum of the results of the practice will be very harmful.
Communism begins with the notion that the end justifies the means. Natural law understands that it is the means and nothing else that determines the end. A communist might say “you have to break eggs to make an Omelet. In every case, the suggestion is that an immoral act is going to end up doing good for society. Any type of economics by force is going to fare worse than those where free markets are the norm.
Another well known point of natural law is that power corrupts. So far, I haven’t found a soul who disagrees with that principle. So, we elect a president, and his supporters act if they have a messiah working for them. What they have done is increase the level of power of another human being by making him president. More corruption always comes with more power. The United States must have a president but citizens must realize that it is their job to reign in the leaders they elect. In all cases, the masses are more moral than their leaders even though the population may not see it that way. Even though democracy is far from perfect, it does provide ways for the more moral portion of humanity to control the less moral few who are elevated to powerful positions.
Times Got Really Weird
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