Render Unto Caesar

While I no longer believe that the Bible is the unadulterated word of God, I do believe that it is an important part of our literary and cultural heritage. Some people quote Shakespeare, some people quote the ancient gay Greeks, I prefer to quote the Bible, probably because I am more familiar with it.

Again, I am not the one who wants to maintain the poor in their poverty, that's what the government, specifically the Democrats, want to do. Okay, that's what it appears to me they want to do. Perception cannot be proven or disproven. If that's the way it appears to me, then that's the way it appears to me. Of course it might appear differently to someone else, but that's their problem. I seem to remember that Uncle Ken said some time ago that he and his ilk were not trying to lift the poor out of poverty, they were just trying to give them a little help. This may be where I got the idea, but I also might have previously heard it from another source, "in the ages lost to memory". (Quoted completely out of context from the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes.)

I'm pretty sure that the "lowest common denominator" theory came from my former Bircher friends, but I could be wrong about that. If you were to confiscate all the wealth of the rich people and distribute it to the poor people, it wouldn't go very far because there are many more poor people than there are rich people. All that would accomplish would be to add the formerly rich people to the ranks of the poor. Then who are you going to get to fund your next redistribution scheme?

The original quote about paying taxes is, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." This has been interpreted to say that we have to pay our taxes, but it doesn't say that we have to vote for them.