At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where in three days of battle 51,000 Americans killed each other, President Abraham Lincoln spoke about the importance of government. The year was 1863.  The American nation was at war with itself... largely over whether or not the federal government should address regional and local problems. Of course, every school child knows that the issue associated most with the Civil War was slavery.  Some Americans believed slavery, the ownership of people as property, was an economic necessity. They pointed out that the Bible affirms slavery as a social and economic reality and gives instruction about how to treat slaves.  The very idea was repugnant to them that the government should intrude on a personal, business practice.  Many other American citizens were equally repulsed by the idea that people could own other people.  A whole bunch of other people simply didn’t want to get involved in the argument. Most white people didn’t have the money to buy slaves, so lots of them said it’s probably a good idea to do what the Bible says to do.  The opinions of people who were not white were thought to be of no importance, whether or not their ideas were affirmed by Holy Scripture.

For awhile compromises were considered that might allow people who needed cheap labor to buy and sell slaves and to keep them as property. People who didn’t like the practice didn’t have to participate. If it bothered them too much, they could move from a state where slavery was allowed and go live in another state where slavery was illegal. One of the ideas most frequently and enthusiastically supported was to allow the individual states to make their own laws without regard to the federal government.  Even today American laws are like a patch-work quilt spread across fifty states.  Gun laws are different from state to state.  Death is the penalty for capital murder in some states, and in others the death penalty, like slavery, has been abolished.  In my own state of California the issue will once again be on ballot in the next election. Two persons of the same gender are allowed to be married in New York, Massachusetts, and Washington, but not in most other states.  In California a group of same gender couples, my son and my son-in-law were among them, who were married in a short period when such marriages were legal have been permitted to remain married even after voters in the state voted to forbid such unions.  The driving speed limit may be different from state to state.  Taxes, school funding, police protection and dozens of other matters are decided state by state and sometime city by city within a state. The state of Arizona is trying to establish its own immigration laws.  Every now and again Texas talks about breaking out and not being part of the United States; but mostly when somebody like a whacko-governor suggests secession, most people just look away embarrassed. 

And every now and then a movement gets started around the idea that natural law is altogether better than government... Just let people do what is to their advantage to do, and everything will be all right.  Let everything be done by individuals and groups of individuals who can find a way to sell “in the market place” the services that people need, and competition “in the market place” will keep the prices of everything affordable.  If somebody can’t afford something it just means he or she isn’t trying hard enough to get it.

I don’t have to go on with this argument... mainly because everybody who knows me knows on which side of it I will come down.  Everybody who knows me knows that I like the ideas of President Abraham Lincoln.  He was a Republican and I am a Democrat, but he was my kind of guy.  He believed in government, just as the people who founded the American nation believed in government.  He saw first hand the result of anarchy. Over 600,000 people died during the Civil War when Lincoln was president.  Leaving everything to individuals or even to individual sections of the country simply can’t make a strong nation.  America is strong because of a commitment by good people to maintain the kind of government promoted by Abraham Lincoln who said that government of the people, by the people, for the people is so important that it must not be allowed to perish from the earth.