The truth claims advocated by socialists — nearly all of them — are not truth. They are claims offered as truth. Claims propped up against truth in order to hide it. But they are not truth. Expansion of the state is an objective moral evil that always comes at the expense of the Church. This is not merely the case today; it is the lived history of Christianity throughout the ages.

When Henry broke with the Pope, one of the primary goals of his successors was to crush the Catholic Church — the supposed enemy of the English State. One of the primary mechanisms was to steal the property of Catholic entities — like religious orders — and turn that property over to the lords who ruled the English state. Eastern Christianity suffered no end of difficulty because of the incessant meddling of the emperor of Constantinople in the spiritual affairs of the Church. Heretic emperors would often choose heretic bishops, and the Church as a whole suffered as a result. In the West, students of Latin American history will discover the common timing between the expansion of the state and persecution of the Church. When Mexico came out of its own Revolution, the state seized lands, the oil energy, and most of the institutional power in the society. Shortly thereafter, the dictatorship of Plutarch Elias Calles’s Maximato emerged. This last event coincided almost precisely with the persecution of the Mexican Church, the banning of the right of religious authorities to legally marry people (a ban which persists today), and the outright murder by the state of a great many people.

And yet there have always been religious persons from the left or right who offer bankrupt apologies for the particular evils advocated by a particular manifestation of the expansionist state. Before ever there was a Hugo Chavez to blight Venezuela, there was a democratically elected right-wing president named Carlos Andres Perez who used the power of his office to enrich himself. To call Mr. Perez corrupt is to insult those who merely have a flawed understanding of reality. He was a thief. But the real champion of right-wing advocates of raw state power was Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. He turned Nicaraguan society into his own personal fiefdom. By the time he was overthrown, the coalition arrayed against him included just about everybody in the country except his own family, with political views ranging from left to right. The military power of this opposition was largely held by a group called Sandinistas — and this has led to a left-wing manifestation of raw state power that replaced the former right wing version.

In our own beloved United States, we now have a government that has legalized intergenerational theft. There is no other way to put it. Any government that implements policies for which twelve and thirteen figure annual deficits are indefinitely foreseeable — any such government — is stealing from our children in order to pay for whatever nonsense they choose to foist upon us. Such a vast expansion of the American state bodes ill for the U.S. and the world at large.

Expansion of the American state has crushed the poorest and most vulnerable persons. It has precisely coincided with the annual murder of more than a million pre-born human persons. Indeed, it was the unconstrained state, in the form of its judiciary, that hurled this particular evil at American society. It has brought with it the impoverishment of women and children, victims of the easy doctrine of state-sponsored divorce that usually leaves single mothers and their children in a poverty they never knew in marriage.

Someday, the advocates of the expansionist state will have to answer some simple questions. A couple of those might be: “Why did you think that government-controlled access to a doctor was more important than the marriages of my little ones? Why did you believe it acceptable for the government to deprive my littlest ones of their very personhood? Why did you trust the government and not me?”

Yet the article gives a list of the truth claims advocated by socialists.