Peggy Noonan has a great, thoughtful essay today (no surprise) on the impossible demands currently being made on the politicians in Congress to decide every sort of difficult issue, from international to local. In part at least, this barrage of complexity enables those who want bigger government to slip through increases in government size and responsibility. She points out that demanding a Congress full of Platos, Solomons and Socrates's is ridiculous. It is a great essay in favor of small government. Read it here.

One of the basic underlying ideas to her essay is that human beings have limits. We are finite. Asking finite beings for infinite wisdom will result in tragedy, or if we are lucky, farce. The ancient Greeks understood the nature of human limits: humans are between gods and animals. To act like a god, that is to act as though one had no limits, was called hubris. Engaging in hubris was understood to bring tragedy. Think of the myth of Icarus, the fellow whose father made wings to fly away and escape from imprisonment. Not heeding his father's warnings he flew too near the sun, the wax in his wings melted, and he plummeted to his death. He forget his limitations, tried to act like a god, and his end was destruction. In the words of a famous American philisopher--A man's got to know his limitations.

The liberal push for bigger and bigger government, controlling more and more of human life, is a recipe for tragedy. Humans cannot succeed at controlling everything. Especially not one elite governing group. In the Christian world-view, we have a similar idea to hubris--sin. Only God has the omni's: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. A state claiming omnicompetence is reaching for forbidden fruit, trying to attain the status of God. We know how that story ends.

This lesson is hard for Americans to learn. We like to think in terms of infinite possibilities. Some years ago Michael Crighton wrote a decent novel using the plot of Greek tragedy--Jurassic Park. In the novel the Theme Park creator tried to be a god by bringing extinct creatures back to living in the present. He was punished for his hubris, eaten by his creatures, after causing much suffering. In order to appeal to a popular American audience, when made into a movie the tragedy of hubris was removed, and a happy ending inserted. In real life we do not always get to rewrite.