Time is Money
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

I've got good news for all you egalitarians out there. I know it's tough that some folks are taller than others, some smarter than others. Some folks have more money than others, but we all have the same 24 hours a day. We may wish we had more. We may use it more wisely than others, but no one gets more, no one gets less. There is however, a wide range of differences among people regarding the demands on time. My dear wife, for instance, charged with the care of four small children, isn't in the same boat in terms of free time that she once was, and once more will be. She is excited when she gets a free half hour to work on her photo albums. I, though in the midst of trying to model a more simple lifestyle while feeling simply harried, probably have fewer demands upon my time than the president (though he obviously had the time to schedule a few unscheduled visits into his routine). But I don't feel sorry for him. You see, the biggest demand I have on my time comes from the President.

I'm not suggesting that the enticement of watching him squirm through his legal troubles is a demand on my time. I managed to see roughly thirty seconds of his deposition. Rather Mr. Clinton, as the head of the executive branch of the federal government, owns my time. It is he who insists that his lackeys at the IRS, a private company hired by his treasury department as a collection agency, seize my wealth. It is he who, year after year, spends more of my money than he takes. (Make no mistake about it. The federal budget is balanced only if you mean by is, isn't.) It is he who seeks and enforces a slew of regulatory burdens that cost us tens of billions of dollars each year. It is he who serves as the poster child for inefficient, intrusive and insane state and local political leaders.

Now, we are a spiritual people. We don't like to be seen as money grubbers. We ought to be above all that. The love of money is, after all, the root of all evil. We are prosperous, and they keep telling us that the government needs our money to do that thing they do. But the issue isn't only about money. It's about time. The money that the government takes from us isn't found money, but earned money. And the most precious commodity we invest with which to earn money is time. Most of us haven't taken the time to find out how much time is being stolen from us by the government.

If you were to add up the costs of governments at all levels, including taxes taken, money borrowed, and the costs of regulations, and divide it by the gross national product, and divide that by how many days are in the year, you'll figure out Cost of Government Freedom Day. For the mathematically challenged, you'll have to trust me on this. Every man, woman and child in this great land is working for the government from January I to sometime in early July. To put it more bluntly, we are all of us the slaves of the state for over half of each year. Mad yet?

If not, consider a few more implications. Have you been saving for your retirement? Think you could save enough for retirement in 30 years of hard work and frugal living? Got 12 more to go? You'd be done by now, if governments took only as much as God requires for Him and His kingdom. You could be fishing, studying, visiting with the grand kids, traveling the country in an RV, going to craft fairs, reading slowly and carefully fine literature like Every Thought Captive. You could be doing what you have been waiting to do. Every morning you get up and go to work not for the electric company, the mortgage company, the finance company. It's all because of the government. They have taken the best years of your life.

Consider this. If your active working life is 50 years, you would be a slave for 25 of them, 18 more years than you could have been a slave in Old Testament Israel, no matter what you had done wrong. You are a slave for 25 years of your life. Not a pleasant thought, is it? Consider this. Our founding fathers worked for the British for half as long as we work for our masters, and they deemed a revolution necessary.

Governments are stealing our time, indeed our very lives. They believe that they have a claim on your time because they believe that we belong to them. They believe they are entitled to fifty percent of our working hours because they believe that they are more important, more powerful, more worthy than God Himself. They might as well have locked us all up for 25 years, using our time stamping out license plates.

Seeking limited government, working to coax the beast back into his cage, we don't work for that so that our checking account will get bigger. I'm not angry at the government because they have taken the money I had earmarked for a big screen TV and spent it on protecting the one-legged wangle-weasel. I'm mad because they have stolen my time. I have better things to do than to work for them. I've got important work to do. So, I imagine, do you. And so I must spend part of my time working to get my time back from those that steal it. I've been commanded to redeem the time because the days are evil. But I can only redeem half of it, because Caesar is evil. Not misguided, not over zealous, not indifferent,but evil. Pray that, we His people would be let go.