Faith Based Folly and Non-profit corporations

If the greatest plight to mankind is the Interest Mechanism, then the second greatest ailment is the concept of non-profit corporations. The Presidents idea to disolve the role of government by shifting the burden of collective responsibility to faith-based organizations is scurrilous.

The American tradition of non-profits starts from the concept of the separation of Church and State. As such, the Church is seen as a separate and free entity, and removed of any obligation to the state. The Vatican is its own country within the borders of Italy, and this solution is applied to all churches within our country. The sovereignty of God is expressed in the same way that Native Americans have sovereignty and foreign embassies have sovereignty on their land. This sovereignty allows one to be distinct, and unaccountable, from the body politic. It is, in essence, a political divorce. The land and the history of the nation is shared, but not any collective responsibility to one another. Churches are free of tax obligations, and non-profits are granted the same status of imitation sovereignty.

The presumption is that these organizations answer to a higher and more pure duty, and are therefore free of the pedantry of government. Government, after all, is nothing better than a necessary evil. By limiting the ability of government to exercise political control of religion, particularly through a tax burden, it is assumed that the body politic will be better protected. Non-profit corporations are an extension of the same logic. Unfortunately, the logic is faulty, both by extension and from the original assumption. The solution, while very old, is not a solution at all, but an extension of the original problem.

The original problem is that man must live under a system of authority. Whether we pledge allegiance to the king or the rule of law, we must recognize both a source and a process for central authority. Every society and subsystem is arranged according to the pattern of the family. There is a head father figure, a secondary leader like the wife, and the subjects who are its children. In America, our three branches of government serve the same roles. The President is the father, the judiciary is the wife, and the congress the subjects. In a school, you have the principal, the teachers, and the students. In the school system, you have the superintendent, the schools, and the voters. In a business, you have the owner, the workers, and the customers. This pattern is everywhere.

Under monarchy, this pattern was God, the King, and the people. There was always a conflict between God and the King, because those who represented God saw their family as God, themselves, and the people. The government was insinuating itself as a fourth party in their trinity. History can be understood as the story of the alliances and conflicts between God and the King. Democracy was the attempt to remove religious interpretation permanently out of the body politic, so that the common morality of religion could bind the men together, rather than the specific interpretation of scripture being a perpetual source of division.

Essentially, what democracy does is reverse the hierarchical order of the family. Rather than God, King/government, and then the people, it makes the people the head of the family. The people appoint the government, and God is left precariously unconnected. The tax exemptions and non-profit status of charities and churches thus removes God from the family, and devalues His authority completely. This arrangement of power is rejected both by conservative Christians and what we call Muslim extremists. So they use their political power as a tool to reassert the primary authority of God. And, when political power fails, they resort to force.

Morality, it turns out, is a double-edged sword. It can provide the justification for ending slavery, but it can also provide the moral justification for the North to wage war on the South. Morality in a vacuum does not prevent abuses any more readily, perhaps, than the morality of the King. A king, because of his authority, could have simply freed the slaves, had he been so inclined. What is commonly regarded as a battle of political will, then and now, should be seen as a battle of moral interpretation.

The issue of gay unions, for example, is based on the fact that the government recognizes marriages and provides certain tax and insurance benefits associated with that marriage. But, marriage is not a governmental affair, it is a moral and religious affair. The government has no need to recognize any religious ceremony if there is a wall of separation between Church and State. The government, by establishing a religious sacrament in its law, broke the barrier of separation. We fell back into the historic pattern of the intermingling, as those who desire God’s authority as uppermost desired. The premise for gay unions is the same political will to assert the primacy of the people’s political rights that the conservatives used to reestablish God’s authority. We are back to fighting religious views again., and the intermingling is taken for granted.

The modern day partisanship of our democracy can then be expected to be deadlocked forever, unless we are willing to take a second look at this arrangement. God is not going to go away because he has tax-exempt status.

The system we have today essentially allows anyone who fills out a piece of paper to be exempt from paying taxes to the federal treasury. The concept of non-profit grows wider and wider. The government, which is charged for the responsibility of caring for the good of all the people, has delegated part of its authority to anyone who can fill out a form. While the charities claim that their intention is the greater good, their first act is one of selfishness and withdrawal to administer to their pet peeve. Rather than building the community, they serve to weaken its foundation, not by the acts they perform, but by their financial separation from the body politic.

The church and non-profits receive its funds from the general population, the same population that it is committed to serving. The net effect is that we have set up a competition between the government and the non-profits. Marketplace theory postulates that competition is good, but both organizations are not seeking profit, they are seeking the greater good. By competing, they essentially drain each others funds back and forth, duplicate effort and, unlike in the for-profit world, neither will go out of business. They will simply drain more funds from the general population, and use the funds less effectively, to insure their survival.

Thus, non-profits and the Church, by being separated, weaken the government and the society, not strengthen it. The balance that the American Revolution hoped to achieve has failed. The President’s proposal for faith-based funding accelerates the growth of non-profits, when the proper choice is to rein them in. The sovereignty of the Church and non-profits needs to be ended, not promoted. They are citizens, and should share in the same responsibilities as all of the citizens. Separate but equal is not a workable solution.

If democracy is to work, then morality and God need to be more clearly integrated into the family of society. What was assumed to be a political problem two hundred years ago was really one of taxation and authority. The political parties have squared off on opposite sides of different issues. Republicans want authority, and Democrats want government funded protections. Both sides try to use the other’s argument for their advantage. So Democrats argue for the authority to tax, and Republicans argue for the individual’s freedom from government. We didn’t really defeat the King, we split him in two.

The missing piece is morality, and funding faith-based charities will make it worse. The problem is the tax code and our banking habits. Neither are moral. Dumping the failures of government on the churches may re-create the divisive history of the past by relinquishing the authority of the State to the Church. Both the Church and the State live off unearned funds. Once the Church reassumes its power through wealth and political control, we are essentially back where we started from.

The solution is to end the tax-exemption status of non-profit entities, including the church, by changing the tax code so we tax goods at the beginning of the manufacturing cycle, rather than at the end of the selling cycle. That way, everything manufactured is automatically taxed, and it begins to end the semi-sovereign relationship of non-profits with the body politic.

The bigger problem, and the cause for the need for charities and evermore government services, is the existence of unearned income. While unearned income is a mainstay for the government and non-profits, it is also the preferred choice of the people too. The stock market and the Interest Mechanism provide a way for those who do not work to benefit greatly. If someone is going to be paid when they do not work, that means that there must be someone somewhere who is doing work without getting paid. Where before this had been the pleasure of only the King and the Church, now it is the pleasure of everyone in our society. We all feed off the unearned income, which means that much of the work we do goes unpaid. The inflation, which is caused by the interest, creates the effect of an economy where one can work harder and earn less, even though the dollar amount seems higher. This increases the need for more and more charities. The President’s proposal of government funded charities invites economic collapse and political regression. We need to redraft the tax code, and alter the role of corporations.