Biblical & Constitutional Healthcare
U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico (D–TX) claims that his “fight for universal healthcare” is “biblical” because “when Jesus healed the sick, he didn’t ask for a deductible.”
IN FACT, Talarico is contradicting the faith he professes, perverting the words of Jesus, and flouting the Constitution. Here are the specifics:
- The Bible contains at least 50 passages about giving, and none of them involve government handouts but self-sacrificing generosity.
- Jesus told people to give in “secret” instead of announcing it “with trumpets,” as Talarico does while promising to give away other people’s money.
- The Bible says to “give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion,” as is the case with taxation.
- Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan had nothing to do with government but an individual who sacrificed his own time and money to help someone in need. Jesus then said, “Go and do likewise,” not what Talarico is fighting for.
- Prior to the advent of the welfare state, Americans widely served as Good Samaritans by caring for the poor and the sick, and Thomas Jefferson extolled the benefits of this system, writing that you “seldom meet a beggar” and we “save a much greater proportion” of the sick “in our plain way, at a smaller expense.”
- In the 1830s, a French historian and political scientist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S. and wrote that what “I most admire in America” is how “private” citizens cared for the “welfare of society” without “cooperation of the Government” and that the “sum of these private undertakings far exceeds all that the Government could have done.”
- The proper role of taxes and government in the Bible is to stop “those who do wrong,” like murder and stealing.
- Similarly, the Declaration of Independence — which was signed by people steeped in Biblical principles — affirms that the purpose of government is to “secure” God-given “unalienable Rights” like “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
- The Constitution — which was enacted by people steeped in Biblical principles — is the written pact that established the federal government, vested it with certain powers, and requires that all federal, state, and local government officials and judges be “bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support” it.
- Contra Talarico’s agenda, James Madison, the father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights, wrote that the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution doesn’t allow the federal government to create social programs because it only applies to the “particular powers” in the clauses that follow it, such as coining money, issuing patents, and regulating commerce with foreign nations.
- Likewise, Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote that the federal government doesn’t have “unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated.”
- Until Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened in 1937 to pack the Supreme Court with six added justices, the Court commonly ruled that the federal government doesn’t have the power to establish social programs, which now account for 60% of all federal spending, or 76% when including interest on the national debt primarily caused by social spending.
