Our Threatened Freedom

Should Life be Better at the Top

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 154-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 154

Dictation Name: Vol. L - Part 11 - Should Life be Better at the Top

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Should life be better at the top? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

For some months now I have had a news item sitting on my desk which has been irritating me. One Washington D.C commission head in the latter part of 1982 decided to have his office and his agency’s chief counsel’s office remodeled and redecorated at a cost of 85,000. Now 85,000 is more than most of us paid for our whole house. As taxpayers we have to pay for better housing and better offices for our bureaucrats. The agency head remarked the place looked shabby the way it is. Does your office or your house look shabby the way it is? Are you paying the boys in Washington to live better, or to govern better?

I would agree quite emphatically that people in superior positions should live better. The idea that an important executive should get no more than his lowliest employee is nonsense. It is a sound biblical principle that a laborer is worthy of his hire. The more responsible and important his work, the better should be the rewards thereof be. There are however limits to all of this. Too often our top men in state and federal governments live in palatial circumstances with every kind of service and convenience provided at our expenses. There is a very real distinction between a deserved compensation and exploitation.

Increasingly it would appear that at some levels the compensation of civil officers has made the transition from a just and due reward for services rendered, to exploitation. Then we the taxpayers become the exploited. Life should be better at the top, but it should not be exploitive. Moreover, let us remind ourselves we are paying all civil officials to govern better, not to live better. Some people are entitled to special privileges because they render important and special services. But when those privileges become exploitive, a distance is created between the men at the top, and the people. That distance is growing, especially now with both inflation and increasing unemployment. It is a very unhappy and foolish thing for federal officials to feel that large sums of money must be spent to provide them with royal accommodations. In doing so they are bringing to their office the contempt of the American people, and they tarnish the forms of freedom.

This has been R.J Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.