The Omniscient Bureaucratic Plan

Government As Papa

We are all familiar with the inevitable stupidity, wastefulness, inanity and bizarre outcomes when life is ordered by government bureaus, laying down regulation upon regulation.

God's created world is fearfully and wonderfully complex.  Nuclear physicists are only now beginning to realise just how complex.  Human beings, unique as the image bearers of God Himself upon the planet, are likewise subtle, complex, variegated, diverse, and complex.  Consequently, a bureaucratic plan setting out to order human actions is doomed before it starts.  Its outcomes and results are inevitably bizarre and would be laughable if they were not also sinister.

Here is just one example:

KAYSVILLE — Davis High School has been fined $15,000 after they were caught selling soda pop during lunch hour, which is a violation of federal law.  The federally mandated law prohibits the sale of carbonated beverages after lunch is served. The program is an effort to help fight childhood obesity and to have young students make better food choices.

The mandate allows for carbonated beverages to be sold before lunch, but restricts students from buying lunch, then purchasing carbonated drinks afterward.  “Before lunch you can come and buy a carbonated beverage. You can take it into the cafeteria and eat your lunch, but you can’t first go buy school lunch then come out in the hallway and buy a drink,” said Davis High Principal Dee Burton.  Principal Burton said he does not understand the law with rules that seem to be contradictory.

“We can sell a Snickers bar, but can’t sell licorice. We can’t sell Swedish Fish, we can’t sell Starburst, we can’t sell Skittles, but we can sell ice cream, we can sell the Snickers bar, Milky Ways, all that stuff,” said Burton. The school is bound to obey the law, however, if they want the $15,000 the federal government gives to subsidize their school lunch program. 

Burton said the money they will use to pay the fine was typically used to help pay for their music and arts department among other school activities.  Burton said his pop machines will continue to stay completely unplugged until they can figure out how to get them all into a room with a door that can be shut and locked during the lunch hour.

The ultimate security for the average Westerner is the Bureaucratic Plan.  Most would read the story above and respond by calling for a better Plan.  Revise the Plan! would be their reflexive, conditioned demand.

Those more astute and aware of idolatry's invidious insinuations into the heart would reject the very concept of the Plan itself.   It has replaced a belief in the providence of God.  Any grand aspiration is too risky unless it be regulated by the Plan.  Whereas in other cultures risks are willingly accepted and exploited in an attempt to move forward, in the West there is a dread of unforeseen or negative consequences.  A Bureaucratic Plan must be set up to mitigate risks and bad outcomes from the beginning. "Do I dare?" asked Prufrock.  Not without government rules and regulations holding our hands.

But creation itself is far, far too complex to be so rationalistically structured, micro-managed, and paternalistically ordered.  Human action, much more so, due to human creativity, inventiveness, coupled with human perversions.  The more comprehensive the Bureaucratic Plan, the greater the damage, folly, and harm done.  The spheres of human action lawfully subject to state administration must be severely restricted--lest we suffer the consequences.  The folly and tyranny of the Bureaucratic Plan will be our inevitable lot.

Cede to the government the power, for example, to provide health and wellbeing and the inevitable Plan to deliver the false promise will end up overreaching, seeking to control every human action.  All actions could "legitimately"  be coded healthy or not; all could be regulated as approved or not. 

Should one breathe upon another?  Do we dare, or do we not?  What does the Plan say?  Should we drink soda before lunch or after?  What does the Plan say?  The United State used to profess that it was in God they trusted.  Now the trust of that people lies is in the endless Bureaucratic Plan.  Layers upon layers of rules and regulations, the unending Sarah Lee effect, seek to replace the good providence of God. 

"In God we trust", or "In Government we trust"?  The United States along with all Western nations made their choice about a century ago.  Luther once famously quipped that the only part of the human anatomy not laid claim to by the popes of his day was the rear-end.  The bureaucratic popes of our day have gone way, way beyond that.  Isn't life under the Bureaucratic Plan just grand?