Charity and Generosity that Aren’t

Tibor R. Machan

In a recent stump speech urging people to keep Democrats in power, President Obama told his audience that America is a country based in large measure on the principle that “we are all our brothers’ keepers.” This is not true, but even if it were and even if that idea were itself a good one, President Obama’s political philosophy has nothing to do with it.

What the president and those who share his politics believe in is the coercive welfare state, not in charity or generosity. For both of these are strictly voluntary--one cannot be charitable or generous by putting a gun to the heads of other people and ordering them to part with their resources for the purpose of supporting various endeavors that these other people haven’t chosen to support. Neither the enforcers nor the victims can claim to be charitable or generous, not by a long shot.

Why, then, does a perfectly well educated man like President Obama, who clearly must know better, insist on characterizing what he favors as charity and generosity? It is very likely a ruse, a way to disguise the real truth which is that he and his cohorts aren’t in favor of charity and generosity at all but in favor of coercing other people to part with their resources to support programs they have not chosen to promote.

Take Obamacare, as an example, which by all accounts isn’t favored by most Americans. Even if it were clearly morally commendable to give health care and health insurance to people who aren’t able to afford it, there is nothing morally praiseworthy in making such “giving” a matter of law and public policy that one isn’t permitted by the government to withdraw from or reject.

The hallmark of morality is to do the right thing of one’s own free will. It isn’t morality when one is regimented to do what is right, it is tyranny! Such regimentation deprives the deed of its moral significance--at most it becomes desirable behavior, at worst involuntary servitude.

But for some reason these facts are systematically disguised when people like the President try to defend the coercive welfare state. The effort to make it all look like a matter of charity and generosity instead of what it is, robbing Peter to benefit Paul (but not before a good portion of the take is handed to the coercive agents themselves), most likely aims to fool people by making them feel like they are greedy, cold hearted, and stingy if they don’t support the program.

This the people clearly need to reject, disown, big time. There is nothing greedy about rejecting the coercive welfare state, not at all. It amounts, instead, to rejecting criminal confiscation of one’s resources, a confiscation that in fact makes the victims less and less able to be charitable and generous and enables the criminals to do with the resources what they please.

Back in the days when pharaohs, kings and czars claimed they owned the countries they ruled, including all its wealth--never mind that they had little to do with producing any of it themselves--government may have seemed to be charitable and generous when it handed over some of this wealth to certain of its subjects. (Even then it was mostly for favors gained from them, not to be helpful!) This is because these monarchs did in fact have legal--though rarely moral--title to the wealth under their control. So their handing it to some (few) needy others could plausibly look like charity and generosity.

But there is no justification for this view seeing that the idea that the government owns the country’s wealth is pure poppycock (despite what some prominent legal scholars claim). It is the citizenry that owns the wealth, not the government (apart from some of the politicians’ private holdings which they rarely part with other than so as to help them gain power).

In our day it is pretty clear that government does nothing much that’s productive. It may, if it does its job right, provide protection for its citizenry from those who would violate their rights, including their property rights. But as it now stands this proper job of government is nearly everywhere corrupted and government has joined the criminal gangs that embark upon extortion, theft, confiscation and oppression, not on what the Declaration stated as its task, the securing of our rights.