In his letter to the Church at Philippi, the apostle Paul councils that each of us should look out not only for the interests of ourselves but also for the interests of others. 

While speaking before an audience of high school students in New Hampshire, Senator Hillary Clinton dismissed the idea of a society of individual owners and declared her preference for a society of shared responsibility and shared prosperity.  On the surface, it sounds like an idea Paul would bless.

However, unlike Senator Clinton, Paul did not write his letter in an ivory tower but a dank, Roman prison cell shortly before his execution, and he was not speaking about the role of government, but the role of the individual.  Paul tells us that the light of Christ calls us to be the hands by which God touches the lives of others and righteousness is obtained through a choice freely made. 

It is impossible for government to be similarly charitable because government has nothing of its own to freely give to others.  Every dollar the government gives to those it deems deserving must first be coerced away from someone else.  When service is required, it ceases to be charitable.  And when government compels sacrifice at the point of a gun, it is nothing more than despotism.

To be fair, the left is not interested in Christian morality, they are interested in fairness.

When during remarks delivered later the same week Senator Clinton proclaimed that “fairness doesn’t just happen; it requires good policy," she was articulating the new liberal belief that the role of government is not to secure liberty, but to engineer equity. Nature does not see fit to hand out wealth, wisdom, talent, ambition, good looks or luck in equal portions. Yet Clinton and those that share her views have determined that they can do that which God did not seem fit to do. Of course, in order to accomplish this noble end, they must set themselves up as the final judge of what is fair. This is problematic for some of us, primarily because we view government’s role as the securer of rights, not the distributor of rights.

Clinton also remarked that “we have to build a political consensus. And that requires people to give up a little bit of their own turf in order to create this common ground.”  And later: "That means something has to be taken away from some people.” What remains unclear is on what mountain top the senator was anointed with the all-knowing wisdom of who has too much, who doesn’t have enough and how much is fair. 

I am reminded of the story about a boy that returns home from school and tells his tutor that one of his friends has a coat that is too small for him. He then observes that another boy in his class has a coat that is too large. The tutor asks his student how he would solve the problem of the boy with the too small coat. Simple! The boy says he would take the too large coat from the second boy and give it to the first boy, then give the second boy the first boy’s coat. He is promptly beaten by his tutor. 

His solution, like that of Senator Clinton and the rest of the new left, established himself as the arbiter of what is equitable. In so doing, he corrupted the idea of liberty by setting aside the rights of one for the benefit of another. Ironically, he also undermined the cause of virtue because to achieve his ends he forced sacrifice thereby eliminating an important requirement for righteousness: Free will.

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Joseph C. Phillips is the author of “He Talk Like a White Boy."