There is no doubt that our nation today is adrift. We are like a ship without a compass, or a rudder, or even a goal. We don’t know which way to head, or even which way is the way. As a nation we have turned away from the Word of God and from the instructions our founding fathers believed in and looked to, and upon which they built this great country.

John Quincy Adams said, “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts of Christianity.” That bond is being severed in our time, and so we are adrift, and we don’t even know why we have the problems we have.

Although in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics we saw the greatest experiment in socialism in the history of the world come to a disastrous end, and bring utter disaster, and bankruptcy, and famine to that nation; still, socialism is alive in America. We call it the “Welfare State” and “a benevolent government,” but it is the same thing.

An astute nineteenth century writer noted, “America will last until the populace discovers that it can vote for itself largesse out of the public treasury.”

Have we ever discovered that! We are on the way down now because of that discovery, and because of socialist policies that exist in our mixed economy. We have given up the free enterprise economy our founders gave to us. We have followed the socialists—albeit a number of paces behind—down that disastrous road. We are now suffering the consequences, but we have not even begun to see the consequences that will come in the future.

We must recognize that whatever the federal government is spending, it is taking from you and me because it does not have any money that it does not take from us. That is something many people just don’t seem to understand.

Rus Walton put it very well when he said:

Government is not a producer; it is a taker, a taxer, and a spender. Every dollar spent by the public sector is a dollar the government must take from the private sector, from the workers and earners and investors. The dollar taken by government cannot be spent or invested by that productive private sector.

That is why we are having problems. So if we continue in the way we are going, we will see even semi-socialized nations self-destruct like the Soviet Union. It will just take a little longer.

Socialist programs are so benevolent sounding; they sound so Christian—“We are trying to help people.” But it is usually “good intentions” on the part of some politicians or bureaucrats that lead us into disasters. We need to understand that the federal government is extraordinarily wasteful and extraordinarily inefficient, and it creates far more problems than it solves. The Bible teaches voluntary charity—not government theft of property.