What is real charity and fairness?

August 26, 2008 by pu3106.

Lately it seems as if the only people who are given credit , by the mass media,  for doing great things are the ones who are give their money and time to those,  who it is said, cannot help themselves.  This idea is very disarming because the needy almost always present a sympathetic image at first glance.  However, I wonder if those who do this ever consider the consequences of their behavior?  Is giving money to those who often are not doing everything necessary to earn it themselves,  actually improving their lives?  Do the recipients of this charity take this act as a trigger to improve their life or just consume the booty, while it lasts,  and then continue on as before.

Many of these acts of charity involve giving money to people in foreign lands where there are too many mouths to feed and too few working farmers to feed those mouths.  Just buying food and sending it over there does not do anything to help the people sustain their lives over the long haul.  In fact it often enables the families to have additional children which themselves cannot be fed.  This is a vicious circle in which the acts of charity only make the situation worse. Why work hard if someone will take care of you.

This same theme occurs over and over again.  A TV show selects families who have very little income and does a remake of their home as a TV show project.  It all appears so wonderful and rewarding.  But after the TV people have taped the show, which will be used to get lots of people to watch, increase ratings, and in bring lots of sponsor money,  the poor folks who were the object of the show go back to the way they were before.  Often not working very hard, having too many children and just living from day to day with no plan to improve their own lot in life.  Many in fact lose the new or remodeled home and end up worse off than before.

It is easy to see how the people who do these so-called acts of kindness get a warm feeling about their selfless behavior.  But are they really doing this to help the needy, to be not needy,  or is it about making them feel good about themselves.  Most current acts of charity are quite clean and simple.  You give some money to someone or some organization and feel good about yourself.  You may walk with friends on a charity walk and get some other people to donate money for your trouble. The whole thing is kind of like buying a new pair of shoes or getting a new haircut. You don’t have to ask anyone to change what they are doing, to work any harder, or stop doing any distructive behavior.  You don’t have to ask the needy to start helping themselves.  More to the point you never have to get you hands dirty.

Another variation of this idea can be found in the liberal / socialist idea of taking money from the so-called rich and giving it to the so-called poor.  This idea has great support from the mass media. Here the idea seems to be an act of charity forced on greedy successful people by those who are running the government.  This is a more insidious situation because it involves people who have to donate, by force, to people who can partition the government, by electing or supporting elected officials,  to provide more charity/entitlements,  they claim they need or are entitled to.  The people who play the role of the giver in this case are people who are either in government as elected officials or those who are trying to get into the government as elected officials.  The elected or want to be elected officials, who support this form of charity,  always claim they are doing this to insure fairness to the under privledged or some other lofty goal.  However they always use this behaviour as a reason for the needy to vote for them.  It is easy to see how their motives can be suspect.  In this situation the so-called givers, the government officials,  are using someone else’s forced charity to attain power, status and oh by the way money.

Again we are forced to asked the question does this form of charity actually improve the life situation of the needy.  There are several significant downsides to this type of charity.  The first,  the act of forcing people to give their money and wealth to someone else is a form of stealing or theft.  Charity is not real charity unless it is voluntary.  The second , because this form of charity has a tendency to be sustained over time, entitlements are never rescinded, the needy are never required to do anything significant to improve their life. They can just continue to live on the government’s stolen booty forever , while asking for more from those government officials who will agree to do so for some more votes.  The last downside is, wealth and improvements in life is not often generated by those living off the government.  It is the natural tendency for the numbers of people living off the government to increase as people see others living that way. This decreases the numbers of people working really hard to succeed and generate wealth.  For the government to give wealth to the needy someone has to generate it.  The government never, never generates wealth, it only consumes it. This leads to a never ending reduction in true wealth in the country and eventually to poverty for everyone.

True charity begins by each person doing whatever it takes to support themselves and their families.  Charity begins at home. This great country was built by hard working men and women who took responsibility for themselves.  A people who saw hard work as the only true way to succeed.  True charity is not easy, it must be aimed at teaching the needy how to support themselves, not just feeding and giving them things.  It also has to demand that the needy actually begin to be self supporting.  Anything short of those goals is not charity,  but a death trap.  Fairness is about insuring that everyone has the right to try to succeed.  It is not forcing everyone have the same level of success. It is not fair to prevent someone from trying to succeed , it is also not fair to take part of someone’s success away and give it to someone else who did not attain success. Theft is theft no matter what the politically correct call it.

Paul Upson

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