by Jed Estrada

On July 30th, President Bush signed a bipartisan bill to increase the money spent on AIDS in Africa from 15 billion, to 48 billion. This historic bill is what Bush calls a picture of the generosity of the American people, which the Wall Street Journal reports will save 5 to 7 lives. people. Since the benefit of life is so significant, I would be very reluctant to criticize such an expensive gift. But I am left to wonder whether our government is just looking for opportunities to spend money. I don't know how many people can grasp the concept of a multi-trillion dollar national deficit, but it basically means that the next several generations are going to be paying off our nations debt. Our leaders may have promised that they wouldn't raise taxes, but by spending so much on credit they are essentially passing the bill down to the next generation.

On the same day that President Bush approved the AIDS package for Africa, he also signed a bill to bail out  the gigantic Freddie Mae and Fanny Mac organizations, and cover up to 400,000 home owners, according to the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch. It is one thing that the government has spent billions of dollars on disaster relief. It is still another that it spends additional billions on disaster relief in other countries. But for the government to become involved in the 'free market' is a vast overstepping of it's constitutional bounds, and will invariably cause further problems for the market. Not only does this give government a foot in the door of the market, it also opens up dependency for yet another area... our failures. The market bill also included a provision to create a federal backstop to ensure the future stability of the mortgage giants. Businessmen learn judgment and discernment for a reason, so that their companies don't go bankrupt. But now the government has sent the message that they will bail out important corporations who go broke.

So doe generosity and good intentions make it right? Giles St. Aubyn, an author and historian said "It is melancholy to reflect that Mankind has suffered more from ill-judged philanthropy than calculated malice. The road to hell is no less harrowing for being paved with good intentions." To give a gift is a worthy thing, but not if it is not yours to give. It is one thing that our government wishes to use its taxpayers' money abroad, but it is quite another to borrow money against the future, and bind that future in debt. Just because the government deals in the trillions of dollars doesn't mean that basic principles of economics and saving do not apply.

The Heritage Foundation, a research and educational think tank published an article entitled My Neighbor's Keeper? Rethinking Responsibility and the Role of Government, in which it noted that "Government is not solely-- or even primarily--responsible for taking care of our neighbors. That responsibility belongs to each one of us as participants in a variety of relationships and overlapping communities."

So what is our Christian responsibility? When the Bible says to give to Caesar the things that belong to Caesar and to God the things that belong to God, it is addressing an individual responsibility. Our taxes are due to our government, and our gifts are due to God. The AIDS crisis in Africa may be beyond individual generosity, but the poor of our community are always with us. Just because our government gives welfare to the needy in society, doesn't mean that we don't have a responsibility to minister to them. To sit back and ignore them just because they have handouts from the government will only cause more dependency, and make it harder for them to achieve success. An old Chinese proverb says "Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for his life."  As we reach out to help our neighbors, we can teach them to be responsible instead of dependent, and perhaps our politicians will learn to temper their generosity with prudence.

In 1995, the Department of Justice reported a dramatic decrease in serious violent crimes. After a steady rise of criminal violence, this year marked the greatest drop ever, and started a steady decline that continued through the turn of the century. There have been many theories about these facts, including the notion that this is due to the legalization of abortion in 1973. Several professors and lawyers have published papers and articles citing this explanation. Their reasoning is based on statistics that since the poor, uneducated, and single parents are more likely to have an abortion, and since most crimes are committed by 18 to 25 year olds from poor, single, and uneducated parents, according to even more statistics, that the millions of abortions per year since 1973 basically aborted a generation of criminals. Aside from the obvious discrimination and defamation of the poor and uneducated, this reasoning relies far too heavily on a slippery slope fallacy. Is this how society justifies abortion? By saying that they would all grow into criminals anyway?

Lliberal professors saw this as an easy opportunity for put in a plug for abortion. Liberals have been waiting for the chance to jump on the benefits of abortion ever since it was legalized. But what was really the reason for the decrease of crime in1995? Well if we were trying to twist events that into a political statement, it would be just as easy to say that this was because of the newly elected republican legislators, or that the conservative appointed judges of Reagan and Bush Sr. (who according to the Law and Order research society were much less supportive of criminal defendants) were finally starting to curb crime. But in all objectivity, it should be noted that neither of these politically polarized remedies have much of a direct connection on criminal actions, and crime rates themselves. I think we should take a look at the obvious: the statistics.

The Department of Justice uses two sources to create its statistics. It compiles documented arrests, along police and FBI reports from the Uniform Crime Report, but it also relies heavily on National Crime Victimization Survey. The NCVS polls an average of 77,200 households per year, randomly selected by the Census Bureau. The survey asks questions on domestic violence, and is launched from the principle that there are many crimes which aren’t reported to the police. However, in 1989 the NCVS went through a redesign, in which the methodology of the survey was changed, purportedly to improve the gathering of information. The questions were also changed to be more direct, according to the Bureau of Justice. This new method was phased in between 1993 and 1995, in perfect timing with the documented decrease in crime. The interesting part is that the decrease was almost entirely according to the NCVS portion of the statistics. The police arrests and reports for serious violent crimes remained roughly the same, with only smaller decreases towards the end of the 1990s.

It is a sad thing when we become used to evil. This has happened in our nation after 35 years of abortion, where it is starting to become just another side for a politician to take, and not the life and death struggle that it truly is. It is something that is mentioned almost as an afterthought from the pulpits, and just another statistic in our country. Now we have come to the point where people in our nation are showing it to be a benefit. What is truly sad is that the Justice system in our nation is devaluing life on the one hand by narrowing the margins, and lowering the statistics of serious crimes, and then our professors credit the murder of millions of unborn as our solution to crime. Yet even with the sharp drops on the graphs, and the coincidental introduction of a survey redesign, there is still no logical correlation between abortion and crime rates. The statistical evidence that tries to link the two also fails to take into account the ratio of crime with population increases. Dr. John Lott, professor of Law at Yale University, and John Whitley, an Australian economist published their own rebuttal article, in which they applied the theory to all the states, and all the statistics, including abortions before the Roe. vs. Wade decision. Not surprisingly, the evidence did not show a proportional decrease in crime. "Many factors that reduce murder rates, but the legalization of abortion is not one of them. Of the over six thousand regressions that we estimated here, only one regression implied even a small reduction in the murder rate” said their summary.

Do we really understand the value of life today? Do we feel anything when we hear that 50 million babies have been aborted since 1973? Does it hurt us to know that 300,000 people were murdered in Darfur? Do we weep for the 80,000 people killed in an earthquake in Myanmar? A friend on mine recently asked me, "what is life worth, and what is worth dying for?” For example, 60 million soldiers died for us in WWII for the freedom and safety of America and her allies. So would it be worth if the reality was that abortion was decreasing crime? The difference between taking a life and giving a life, is ultimately love. Sacrifice is noble, and the Bible says that there is no greater love. It is a sacrifice that is vastly opposite to the selfishness that defines abortion. Killing only leads to more death, or as Dr. John Lott says, “Essentially, the message is, if you choose death, you get death. With interest.”