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Giving Destroys the Soul
A joke is told of a man who is drowning 50 yards off shore. There are countless variations, but the simplest political version I know is that the Democrat throws the man 200 yards of line, then drops his own end. And the Republican throws 40 yards of line, because even a drowning man has to learn to help himself.
We think that charity is easy to define: it is helping people by giving them things. At least, that is what we teach children. And it is what liberals think “charity” is when they make the argument that Big Government is doing nothing more than what the Bible prescribes.
But this is a big mistake, even by the most well-meaning conservatives. Charity is not “giving people things.” Charity is about helping people. And there is a very simple proof:
“And when you cut the harvest of your land, do not remove the edge of the field when you cut it, and do not gather the leftovers of your harvest. Leave them for the poor people and the strangers – I am your G-d.” [Leviticus 23:22].
Simple enough, right? Command Peter to help Paul.
But if it is so simple that Peter should help Paul, why doesn’t the Torah just say, “when you cut the harvest of your field, give 10% (or 20%) to the poor people and the strangers.”?
The answer is simple enough: because it is not charitable to sap people of their own work, the pleasure and sense of accomplishment that one gets for working for our own crust, even if it is from someone else’s field.
The Mishnah (in Pei’ah) goes one step farther: one who does not let the poor people gather the produce in the field but rather collects it himself and distributes it to them is guilty of stealing from the poor.
Isn’t that amazing? The realization that, many thousands of years ago, societal laws were passed down specifically to help people help each other – by raising each other up, by growing each person’s sense of accomplishment and purpose. Welfare reform came before welfare.
Real charity is interpersonal, not institutionalized. Bureaucracies are not capable of connecting on a human level. All they can do is give people things, creating a long-term, useless, and wallowing underclass. When we want to do real charity, we connect people with each other. Peter’s field is available; Paul will come and work the corners. And both people become better for it.
Published in General
We are rich enough to have a safety net.
The conservative approach is not to throw a 40 foot line to someone drowning 50 feet out, it is to throw a 50 foot piece of twine out and not send out a yacht carrying a well-paid social worker to tie the twine around the person in peril. The Dems throw out a 200 foot piece of 1 inch diameter silk rope and let go of their end as soon as the TV cameras are gone.
My point is that a safety net that is institutionalized, and does not involve helping people to grow, is actually counterproductive.
Saying that “we are rich enough” is like saying that we never have to say “no” to children when they ask for stuff that they do not need. But we already know the result of spoiling children by giving them extra things they have not worked for and have no investment in. We are seeing it in the SnowFlake News every day.
I do think there need to be changes. And we are rich enough to afford it.
AMEN and Baruch Hashem, @iwe! This is the mutuality I mentioned above, in action… :-)
It’s not a safety net it’s a tar pit. Remote, non accountable, dysfunctional corrupt and corrupting programs cannot be fixed. They must be replaced with a variety of programs closer to the people which might allow us to learn how to do things that actually help. Government programs generally do not function as their official objectives state for specific reasons we know. Of course there are people who get in and get out and so are helped, and there are good employees who want to help but that isn’t an excuse for continuing to spread a culture of dependency and single parents in a nation wide monopoly with no means for self correction and which is obviously harmful to millions and to the nation as a whole. To say we can afford it is irrelevant. We cannot afford to destroy the lives of millions of people in order feel good about ourselves. Probably programs that actually help might cost more or much less. My impression is that we haven’t bothered to find out, or to confront the hysteria that occurs when we move people toward training, work and independence because there are always risks of failure and we seem to prefer politically the certainty of mass failure which politicians can wash their hands of because they can articulate nice objectives, offer examples of success here and there and ignore what we’ve done to whole peoples.
Work is a part of being a fullfilled human.
That being said, if people worked as they chose, instead of to live, it would look different.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at in your second sentence there but the first one gets to the heart of it. Work is ennobling and handouts are more destructive than we realize as a society.
Indeed.
You know, John Locke observed (in his Letter Concerning Toleration) that when the church tries to use the state to accomplish its ends, the state usually corrupts the church rather than the church purifying the state.
He was emphasizing the use of the state to force people to have the right theology so they can go to get to heaven.
The Left would read this line from Locke and then grumble about things like Southern Baptists who opposed Obergefell [*ahem*] or The Handmaid’s Tale.
I wonder if there is a strong case to be made that one of the best confirmations of Locke’s observation is from the Left: from Social Gospel theological and political Leftists whose theology led them towards bigger and bigger government welfare program–with the result that it was easier for churches to neglect charity, that churches were even shoved out of the work of charity, and that Christians learned view charity in ways that rewarded laziness instead of teaching work.
(I wish Marvin Olasky were a Ricochet user and participating in this thread! It’s a thesis I’d love to run by him.)
I’m always impressed with the difficulty most of us have taking something for nothing. It’s not uncommon to want to give something in return. The definition of “something” can be loose and very odd. This incident illustrates:
When I was a pup, hitchhiking was a common practice, not yet considered high-risk behavior for either party to the transaction. Filling up my gas tank (I suppose I was more of a dog that hadn’t entirely grown into his feet than a pup, considering I had a driver’s license and a Datsun 510) I’m approached by a guy who says “I’m a trucker that’s broke down. If you’re going downtown, could you give me a ride to the bus station?” Being unsuspicious of suspect sentences and always a soft-touch, I said “jump in.” About six blocks down the street, he volunteers, “just got out of prison today.” I’m pretty sure he said that in the middle of the intersection of 7th and Termino (although the English translation of the cross street suggests possible memory embroidery) and I’m pretty sure I had a sudden vision of a spinning newspaper with the headline: Mangled Remains of Soft-Hearted, Empty-Headed Youth Found: ‘Not a surprise’ say friends and family. (Thirties movie montages being a frequent feature of my dreams, I’ll call this low-level hallucination the God’s truth). I managed to avoid asking the question, “whaaaat were ya in for?” or thinking overly about the import of “just got out of prison today” as a conversational gambit and got to the Greyhound in one piece, undead, and with dry trousers (quite, quite proud of the last).
Getting out he places a rolled up shirt on the back seat, says it has an electric razor in it, and offers to sell it for $5. Not a big fan of electric razors, but still a soft touch, a very-grateful-for-continued-life soft touch, I say, “how about I give you $5 and you keep the razor.” To which he says, “No, no. It’s a good razor. You’ll like it. And if you don’t, you can sell it for way more than 5 bucks.” We go around a few times, but he will not accept the $5 without me getting the razor. I give up and it’s adios and best of luck on the outside and I have a $5 electric razor. Actually, of course, noting especially the placement of the item upon the back seat, what I have is a shirt. Which is better than the .38 used in a bank robbery I was expecting.
Now, I suppose there’s a grifter’s code that says: never accept in charity that which you can diligently gain by fraud. But still. The man really did not want something for nothing.
This is the correct analysis. The structure of the economy is horrifically regressive for reasons that are quite hard to understand.
Woodrow Wilson switched us to a system based on statist inflationism. This “worked” until the USSR fell, NAFTA was passed, and China opened up. Since our system is based on credit growth no matter what they quality, and big government, the Fed has to run with too much inflation (asset bubbles, under measured CPI per the Boskin Commission changes) for the middle class and the poor to survive very well. So we get Trump and Bernie for understandable reasons.
Other than moving away form a poorly governed locality, people don’t have that much agency any more.
Read this David Stockman’s new book, and End the Fed if you want to understand. Or you can wait for the bond market collapse and learn about it the hard way.
People would work as part of life, not to live.
Most people would be happy working at something they enjoyed, around 25 hours a week. That is what people tend to retire into. So going on that, we still all work too much, and have too much stress around work.
This is a side effect of statist inflationism. People’s lives are going to get so much better after all of the bond markets collapse. See Charles Hugh Smith.
The general trajectory of labor has been a decrease. I would expect, as technology increases, that will contiune.
The problem is if we don’t switch back to a pre-Fed, pre big government, pre-credit growth-ism, pre-financialization, deflationary economy, the poor and the middle class are going to get killed. They already are. This is why people want Trump and Bernie. David Stockman is the solution to all world problems. Get his new book.
The GOP needs to wake up to the fact that Mises.org is far more right than wrong. It would get them ready for The Republic’s inevitable future.
@iwalton is right. The problem is the government and the Fed has to very slowly and carefully take their damn thumbs off of everything. This will never happen; so the bond market will collapse.
Real charity is interpersonal, not institutionalized. Bureaucracies are not capable of connecting on a human level. All they can do is give people things, creating a long-term, useless, and wallowing underclass.
When a bureacracy gives, it also takes. It robs those being helped from knowing who they owe gratitude to, and how to respond to that help. Government charity becomes resented by both the people supporting the system and those recieving from it. It also creates a government worker who becomes superior to those on their caseload. And it relieves family from the responsiblity to help family if they can. The biggest beneficiary of government welfare is the government workers who administer and run the programs. That’s why they never go away.
That is a worthy goal. Let’s recruit him! Anybody have a connection?