Men can’t decide what’s best for us

The right or conservatives support individual rights. The left or liberals support community rights. Each seeks power. The right for the individual to control his own destiny. The left for the community to control the destiny of individuals.

Both seek wealth as the means to attain the end, material well-being.

The right holds that the individual seeking his own self-interest will result in the greatest good for the greatest number. If Christian, religious and non-Catholic, he generally believes the Bible will guide his way by prayerful private judgment.

The left believes that the individual freedom of the right, free enterprise and capitalism, has resulted in unjust social institutions, and if the community owned and controlled the institutions, a just society would arise through the judgment and will of the community ruled by elite leaders.

Both are concerned with making the world a good place, but both deny that God in the person of Christ established a church that is to be the authority on faith and morals for all men until he returns. The left also generally denies that man has a fallen nature due to an actual sin of Adam and Eve. This leads to the idea that man is perfectible and so a just social order can be achieved if the proper means are used.

Without individual consciences being guided to true morality through the authority of the church Christ established, there can be no equitable society. Since the state has no basis on which to claim moral authority, anarchy or total control will result. Both conservatism and liberalism suffer from the same error – that man can decide what is best for man without submission to Christ through his Church.

Walter Cameron

Kokomo

Carrier performance harms Postal Service

One of the most common targets for consumer complaints is our own Postal Service. It seems like rate increases are becoming increasingly frequent.

These negative comments cannot be blamed solely on rate increases. Postal Service policies, combined with carrier performance, do figure into the equation, and as evidence I shall relate a personal experience.

For security reasons I rent a box at the downtown post office; no mail is delivered to my residence. Recently I had to mail five outgoing letters so I took a chance. I clipped them, in plain sight, to my outside mailbox at 6 a.m., before I departed for work. Upon my return from work at half-past 4, I would remove them and repeat the process the next day. This went on for close to a week before I threw my hands up in disgust and took them to the post office.

I then phoned the Webster Street post office and was told, “Oh we don’t require the carriers to pick up outgoing mail, they do that as a courtesy when they deliver the mail.” Apparently they don’t. It is truly reassuring to know the level and limit of their courtesy. And that is something to keep in mind when they request another rate increase.

Kenneth Crockett

Kokomo

Problems of Rome settle in America

Recently I came across the following list as it applies to world history:

• Increase in immorality.

• Insecure borders.

• Lack of fiscal responsibility.

• Military forces spread far and wide.

• Government corruption.

• Decline in the family.

Do all these sound familiar today? They led to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Dick Allen

Kokomo