What Is Good Government? And Where Might We Find It These Days?

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “I think I’m on solid ground in saying that almost all, if not all, American governments, whether they are town hall, local, countywide, statewide, and certainly federal do not carry the principle enunciated into fruition [of good government].  That’s not what they think good government is.  This is where we find so much error today.  It’s why we have all these various and sundry debates that never seem to be resolved.  They can’t be resolved.  They all sprang from the fact that we don’t actually pursue and don’t actually ask for, nay, demand good government.”  Check out today’s transcript  AND CLIP OF THE DAY for the rest….

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Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  What is good government?  Do we even know what good government is?  Can someone define what good government is?  That’s a good question.  I don’t know if I can define it.  I’ll try to define it.  I’ll try to say: We have a written constitution specifically so we don’t have oral and verbal arguments over what is supposed to be done or what is within the power of the legislative body, what power is thus then reserved to the people and to the states respectively, as Amendment Ten says.  Outside of that, if we’re talking about local government, what is good government?

It would seem to me if I were going to attempt to answer that question, the first part of the answer has to be that we have to ascertain why we have government to begin with.  What is the purpose of government?  You can’t answer any question without knowing what the purpose of the subject to be discussed or the purpose of the subject – and I mean that in the grammatical sense – of the question.  You have to know what the purpose is.  In almost all the things we discuss and yell and scream about and holler at one another and heap and hurl scandal upon our brothers and sisters, few people attempt to acknowledge and to proceed from the point of view that: Okay, this particular subject, this particular issue has a purpose.

What’s the purpose of government?  If we can know what the purpose of government is, then we can know what good government is.  We would also be able to spot what is bad government.  I told David, I said: We’re going to have to ask that question on Wisdom Wednesday and see if we can arrive at an answer.  Thinking in the abstract and thinking out loud, if someone asked you that question: What is good government?  Define it for me.  I would say that you would probably answer somewhere along the lines of good government protects my rights.  We are hyper-obsessed with the use of the term rights.  Everybody’s got rights.  Everybody has rights to do everything, you name it.  Ironically, though, that truly would be the purpose of government, to protect your rights.

If we proceed a little further in the discussion and the definition of what good government is, we’d also have to ask, as the next part of our little thought experiment here: Where do rights come from?  What is a right?  What’s not a right?  Who gets to determine?  From what authority, from what source do rights come?  As an allegedly Christian people, we should be able to answer that by saying your rights come from God.  Your principal right is the right that must be protected by good government.  Now I can arrive at a definition here.  Most of you won’t agree with it, but I can tell you what it is.  Good government would then protect my right, my liberty to carry out God’s commandments and to act upon them with certitude and with devotion, without erring, without deviating from those commandments.  Any government that gets in the way of that is not a good government.

I think I am safe in saying, or I’m on solid ground in saying that almost all, if not all, American governments, whether they are town hall, local, countywide, statewide, and certainly federal do not carry the principle enunciated into fruition.  That’s not what they think good government is.  This is where we find so much error today.  It’s why we have all these various and sundry debates that never seem to be resolved.  They can’t be resolved.  They all sprang from the fact that we don’t actually pursue and don’t actually ask for, nay, demand good government.

It’s just something to think about as you start your week.  We have to ask for things in order to achieve them.  If you’re not going to ask and be clear about what it is that you desire, you can’t possibly achieve it.  If we’re going to talk about constitutions – last hour I had brought up that the Obama administration is going to spend $75 million for these police body cameras.  Under what authority?  And why can’t Hooterville, Texas buy their own body cameras?  Why can’t Baltimore, Maryland or New Orleans, Louisiana or Chicago, Illinois?  Why is that the business of the president?  Why is that the business of the injustice department?  Are the people in the citizenry of those towns, are they incapable of running, of administering their own police departments?  If we’ve reached that status, if we can’t even administer our own peace officers, which is a fundamental part of having a government to begin with, we have truly then reached anarchy.  I think at some levels we are anarchists.

End Mike Church Show Transcript