Archive for charity
Private Charity Isn’t Enough
Posted by: |“The idea that churches can tackle national poverty, take care of those who are ill, and rebuild communities after natural disasters requires a spoonful of bad moral theology and a cup of dishonesty.” - Robert Parham
In a recent blog post, EthicsDaily.com editor and Executive Director of Baptist Center for Ethics Robert Parham claimed that churches and charities could never do enough to alleviate poverty. Â I agree.
Poverty will never be “tackled” because it is a relative term; a moving target. If you could describe the plight of America’s poor today to a poor person in another country, or an American 100 years ago, they would conclude that poverty had been eliminated. The standard of living among the poorest Americans today is incredible by world and historical standards. Yet we still wage the war on poverty, even in America. This is not a bad thing – helping the down and out can be wonderful and is something Christians are called to. But when we aim at targets like the “end” of poverty, there is no end to what we can justify in order to reach this impossible goal. “The poor will always be with you.” The question for Christians is how best to reach them, spiritually and materially.
The second reason I agree with Parham’s claim is that, to the extent that poverty can be reduced, the church and private charity alone are simply too small to do it. The incredible gains in social and material welfare of the poor in America have not primarily resulted from charity, churches or governments. They have resulted from (mostly) free-market economies.
If we look at poverty in a vacuum as Parham does and ask how private charity compares to government efforts, we could conclude that private efforts are too small. But if we look at government and private efforts combined compared to the power of the market, they would be dwarfed so as to make them hardly important in the big scheme. Charity is a targeted and short-term salve for the wounded; its value is far more in its spiritual nourishment than any material progress it brings. A vibrant free-market is the only institution powerful enough to bring about the kind of dramatic increases in standard of living that most of us wish to see.
Public Choice
Jumping from the premise that private charity is not enough to the conclusion that government must do something places a blind, sometimes idolatrous faith in government that counters logic and experience. The incentive structure in government departments is to perpetuate and grow regardless of their effectiveness or the need for their services. There is no check on whether or not they are effective. In fact, the less effective a bureau of poverty relief is, the more they are rewarded with bigger budgets. If poverty is on the rise, and they will always claim it is so as to increase their importance, the last thing to do is cut the department of poverty relief!
Government programs are also subject to “capture” by interest groups and politicians. Scratch the surface of any government program and you will find that it is not the “general welfare” being promoted, but the welfare of a very small and politically connected group at the expense of the general welfare.
To examine private efforts and claim they cannot tackle a problem is only half the analysis needed. We must also examine government efforts and ask if they can tackle the same problem before we charge them to do it. The field of Public Choice Economics does just this, and you would be hard-pressed to find a case where the market is not providing something and getting government involved makes it better. If Christians have a duty to help the poor, they also have a duty to use their brains to discover ways that actually work. Intentions and actions are not enough, we need to understand how to be effective. This requires some knowledge of economic and political systems.
Wrong about Rights
The most damning and least supported claim in Parham’s article was that it is wrong for a Christian to value other people’s property rights:
“[L]ibertarian morality values property rights over human rights. For a Christian, that’s bad moral theology.”
I beg to differ. What Parham leaves unexplained is how human rights are to exist absent property rights. Private property is not some sacred dogma for its own sake; it is important because there is no other method of peacefully settling competing demands for limited resources. Such resources include food, water, shelter and other necessities of life. Common definitions or human rights include the right to be free from hunger. How can you have this right if you have no right to the very food you need to survive?
If Parham means by human rights the right to food, shelter, health care and other positive rights, this poses an incurable conundrum. Positive rights are a logical and practical impossibility. They cannot coexist with negative rights, or even with other positive rights.
A positive right is a right to something. A negative right is a right from something. A positive right obligates another person to take action. A negative right prohibits another person from taking action. A right to life, liberty or property is a negative right. You are free to live and act and justly acquire property, and no one can prohibit that so long as you are not violating their rights. A right to health care is a positive right. If you have the right to receive health care, someone else has an obligation to give it to you. If I am a doctor and you say you need my services, I am obligated to assist you in a world of positive rights. But what if at the same time I am hungry and need to eat rather than assist you in order to maintain good health? Our positive rights to health care cannot both be fulfilled, and in order for one of us to fulfill them we’d have to violate the other’s negative right to liberty and property.
Indeed, it is not possible to have any moral theology whatsoever without an acceptance of private property. One cannot give generously what one does not own, and one cannot help another by stealing from him.
Means and Ends
To sum up the argument, the author couldn’t imagine the church doing a task to his satisfaction, so his response was to ask men with guns to take money from people who presumably wouldn’t part with it voluntarily, and give it to causes he valued. Everything government does is backed by threat of force. Indeed, that is the only thing that distinguishes government from all other institutions. Let’s remove the intermediary agents (IRS, law enforcement) and revisit the argument with the author as the principal actor:
Churches can’t or won’t do as much to help the poor as Parham wants so he takes a gun door to door and says, “donate or else.”
That’s clearly a barbaric and inhumane way to a more civilized and humane world. Yet voting for people who will appoint people who will hire people who will send threatening letters promising agents with the ability to use lethal force if money isn’t sent to some other agents to spend on social causes is no different in moral terms. The means of the kingdom of God are service, sacrifice, grace and love. The means of all earthy kingdoms are brute force and the threat of it.
When the rich man refused to sell all his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, Jesus did not send Peter and John after him to extract a percentage on threat of imprisonment. He let him walk away. We are to do the same.
Cross-posted at CommonSenseConcept.org
Tags: charity, Kingdom of God, public policy
The Christian Obligation to the Poor: Do No Harm
Posted by: |Christians are called to aid those less fortunate. I think that we often mistakenly take this calling as merely material. Rather than thinking about helping those who are “poor in spirit,” we limit our focus to those who are poor in a pecuniary sense. Rather than offering hope and comfort and forgiveness and love for the deepest needs, we think only of offering alms.
Despite this criticism, I think there is value in helping others in a material way. The question is how? Read More→
Tags: charity, immigration, policy, poor, poverty, wealth
Thoughts on the word “We”
Posted by: |
Progressive Christians deride libertarian individualism as contrary to the value system of the Kingdom of God. In their minds, to start with society, rather than the individual, is a morally superior way of looking at the world, especially if Christians should be seeking justice and peace. “Community first,” or “People before profits,” are common phrases use to promote this ethic. Progressives believe that since individuals live and operate within society, the common good limits individual freedom.
Impressively positive ideas such as “social responsibility,” “fairness,” “the public good,” and “equality” that nobody would ever oppose are used to attract people to give up their rights for the Progressive agendas. Slippery definitions of “common good” or “human rights” (their favorite phrase) justify usurping power from individuals to help “the most vulnerable among us”—the elderly, poor, unhealthy, or immigrant. Since Jesus sacrificed his life for the good of the world, we are to do the same. A society built on this principle of love for one’s neighbor is the only way to create a just society. And, so the argument goes, sacrifice is the best, or only, way to abide by this principle.
This is a savvy way to win the hearts and minds of Christians (and non-Christians) who desire justice. The invitation to “think beyond ourselves” is attractive to those who preach self-sacrifice as the ultimate way to love for one’s neighbor. In a politicized society where democracy is among the highest ideals, people feel warm and fuzzy about collective solutions to the world’s problems. Acting together is better than acting alone, and statements like the following are common:
“We need to fight terrorism.”
“We need comprehensive immigration reform.”
“We need to have a social safety net.”
“We need to stop people from doing drugs.”
“We need to provide health care for everyone.”
Phrases like these abound each day, if not coming from our friends or coworkers, then on the news. Everyone wants to live in a better world. Everyone has an opinion (or three). Everyone wants solutions. Yet Progressives relish a grandiose politically-defined collective called “we,” where power and authority reside at the top. Attaching the sentiments of democracy doesn’t negate the inherent pyramid structure of their arrangement. Even the most purely moral society cannot be arranged this way because those at the top will lack the sufficient knowledge necessary to successfully meet society’s needs. It can only produce an imitation because people become arbitrarily grouped and defined by the supposed “experts” influencing those in power. Individual rights are subsumed under the banner of social justice.
“We” is a loaded word with multiple meanings that can be used to satisfy both cooperative and coercive efforts. It can be delineated in various ways. “We” could be the people of a county, a state, a nation, or a continent. “We” could be the people of a racial segment of society. “We” could be the people of the Gulf States, or the East Coast, or the West Coast. Less geographically, “we” can be a little league, a country club, or a church. Americans are accustomed to thinking about “we” in terms of national identity, in part because since early childhood government schools have conditioned us to think in terms of national boundaries. But the scope of 300 million people make the term “we” a precious entity when the hands of power are concentrated at the top.
But is there a better way to achieve a just society than to define the word “we” by geopolitical identities? Is there a more ethical way for individuals to associate that not only respects their unique differences, but also allows for unity within the diversity of voices? Is there a peaceful way to come together for a common effort toward social justice? And if we find better ways to define “we,” can these groups be based on love and cooperation rather than on power and coercion in order to improve society effectively?
To answer this question, the Christian must think about how he regards his neighbor. Does he believe her to be a free and unique individual created to reflect one of the many diverse qualities of God’s image here on earth? If so, he must then respect her diverse and unique gifts and talents as complements to the rest of society, and permit her to associate with whomever she pleases. He cannot regard her as merely a single unit made to fit into the larger entity called “society” so that “society” can succeed? For him to scheme grandiose social arrangements by starting with “society” violates her by robbing her of respect and individuality.
The early church movement described in Acts 2 has been falsely labeled “Christian socialism.” What is ignored is the obvious point that the success of this new movement was due to the voluntary nature of the collective the early believers were placing themselves within. The Spirit of God guided them, to be sure, but there was nothing coercive about the movement. Everyone’s needs were met not because those involved had to but because everyone involved wanted to. In this way, doing justice is about more than good outcomes, it is about the ways in which those outcomes are brought about.
It is not a Christian duty to ensure that our subjective preferences are imposed upon those around us who may and do have very different preferences. It is our Christian duty to love our neighbor and fight injustice. To seek a just society means we must advocate for a free society where individuals are embraced as unique and worthy of being handed the power to their own lives. We must oppose a planned social order and seeking a free one because we know that groups that emerge spontaneously through free association are likelier to provide a social benefit because people are free to participate. Their benefit to the individual and to society depends largely on the extent to which these groups are joined voluntarily. Forcing people to belong to and identify with the collective effort of seeking social justice will create a society that is neither social nor just.
Tags: charity, collectivism, ethics, social gospel, social justice, society
The War on Poverty Revisited
Posted by: |By Edmund Opitz, originally published in the February 1986 edition of The Freeman.
Capitalism, by conquering poverty, creates the “problem” of poverty.
If we look back over the history of the past two or three thousand years we realize that most people who have ever lived on this planet were desperately poor, not merely poor by our standards – poor by any standards; miserably housed, shabbily clothed, and continually on the verge of starvation, only to go over the edge by the hundreds of thousands during the regularly recurring famines.
Medieval Europe is regarded by many scholars as one of the high points in world civilization. It gave us the great cathedrals, scholastic philosophy, magnificent works of art, literature like Dante’s Divine Comedy, specimens of craftsmanship that grace our museums, and chivalry. But the Middle Ages in Europe suffered from a number of famines. Between 1201 and 1600 there were seven famines, averaging ten years of famine per century. Coming down to 1709, there was a famine in France that wiped out one million people, five percent of the population. The last great natural famine in Europe was the Potato Famine in Ireland in the late 1840s, which claimed about one and a half million lives.
Tags: capitalism, charity, economics, Edmund Opitz, poverty
Why would Christians want prohibition?
Posted by: |Thanks to Jonathan Boatwright for this excellent submission.
In today’s political climate, a hot button issue is the legalization of drugs and more specifically that of marijuana. In this essay, I hope to convince you of two things:
- That the Constitution does not grant the authority to deal with matters of drug prohibition to the Federal Government.
- That mixing government and morality is highly dangerous, and as Christians we should be willing to help those who are held in the firm grasp of drug addiction.
Constitutional Reasoning Against Prohibition
As a (Christian) libertarian one of the things in the debate over drug legalization that troubles me is the notion that Federal law trumps state law. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they delegated to the Federal Government a list of 18 enumerated powers by which the government had the authority and responsibility to fulfill. They also wrote the 9th and 10th amendments, which delegate all other powers to the individual states or to the people of those states. To defend their position proponents of drug prohibition will immediate fall back on the “Supremacy Clause,” and either through willful or forgivable ignorance they forget an essential element to the entire issue: what the Founding Fathers said about the Supremacy Clause.
William Davie, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from North Carolina said:
“This Constitution, as to the powers therein granted, is constantly to be the supreme law of the land. Every power ceded by it must be executed without being counteracted by the laws or constitutions of the individual states. Gentlemen should distinguish that it is not the supreme law in the exercise of power not granted. It can be supreme only in cases consistent with the powers specially granted, and not in usurpations.”
From The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution.
Mr. Davie’s point is that the prerogatives of the Federal Government, those eighteen enumerated powers, and any laws to that affect, do hold sway over any laws that emanate from the states, but that this authority does not, nor should it be interpreted to exceed, those 18 enumerated power. Anything not enumerated in the Constitution as an area of authority of the Federal Government is the authority of the states or the people. For the prohibitionist point to be valid they would have to cite at least one of the 18 enumerated powers which might in any way give such authority, and having reviewed those eighteen specific enumerated powers it is my opinion that such a grant of authority does not exist. That being the case, what bolsters my opposition on a Constitutional level to the “Supremacy Clause” argument are the aforementioned 9th and 10th amendments. The 9th Amendment to the United States Constitution states the following,:
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
This does further damage to the “Supremacy” argument because it clearly indicates that the Federal Governments authority is limited to those eighteen enumerated powers in the Constitution. I could leave my argument there, but to be sure that there is no flaw I would offer an explanation as to the 10th Amendments meaning as well. The 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution reads as follows, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Again, this clearly indicates that the areas of authority of the Federal Government are limited and defined, or enumerated. And that any and all other areas of power are the prerogative of the individual states or the people.
Arguments in favor of the “Supremacy Clause” are at the least unfounded, and at their worst are an interpretation that does away with key elements of the Constitution, the 9th and 10th Amendments, and ultimately make the Constitution a dead letter, as well as making it more easy to simply do away with the rights of the people by Legislative decree.
Moral Reasoning Against Prohibition
First, I want to make one point absolutely clear. Yes, I am arguing for the legalization of drugs, especially marijuana. Does that mean that the consumption of drugs has garnered my tacit approval? No.But for intelligent people to argue against the notion that a man should be allowed to consume in any fashion any substance he chooses is to grant a quiet license to the Federal Government. This quiet license allows the government to legislate on any and all forms of morality, and it goes without saying government is not the best arbiter of what is moral. If the government can legislate on the morality of consuming a potentially dangerous substance where does its assumed authority end? Does it have the right to legislate against speech it deems immoral or dangerous? Does it have the right to bar free individuals from congregating together for the purpose of perpetuating the furtherance of a shared belief that the government views offensive or dangerous? Does it have the right to tell us how to raise our children, where we send them to school or what we teach them ourselves? Or what we teach them about our religious and personal views? Does the government have the right to muzzle our minister, priest, rabbi or cleric in the name of morality? Would we abide by the entrance of a bureaucrat in to our place of worship to tell our minister, priest, rabbi or cleric what he can or cannot preach/teach? Of course not! None of us would abide by the formation of a government agency tasked with the unconstitutional implementation and oversight of such things, nor would we abide by a bureaucrat coming into our home and telling us what books, toys, clothes and food are good or not for our children.
This dependency on government is dangerous and hypocritical. It is dangerous because it does not take into account individual responsibility. It is hypocritical because many who call for prohibition would overwhelmingly defend their right to decide themselves on other matters relating to their own body and beliefs and those of their families. Let us be clear, I am not calling for a libertine society where anything goes. I am calling for individual responsibility. The purpose of the law should be to protect individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
We live in a country known for its desire to help, to donate money to charitable, social, religious, and first aid programs. The tsunami in the countries of the Indian Ocean, and more recently the earthquake in Haiti are prime examples of this. The large sums of money, reaching the millions, if not billions of dollars, are an indication that a large portion of society could be willing to donate to organizations or programs whose stated goal or more, is to rehabilitate those who are snared in the vice of habitual drug use. This in essence would give individuals the social, secular and religious impetus to open such institutions. And as it relates to Christianity, it is a perfect avenue for healing the body and soul of those on the fringes of society. The prohibitionist argument, it seems, has ensnared well-intentioned Christians in the notions that all drugs users should be locked up and the key thrown away. We see far less compassion today for habitual drug users than Jesus himself had for a prostitute and a man possessed. Jesus Christ did not see an infirmed man, foaming at the mouth and spouting nonsensical ravings. Nor did he see a filthy harlot. He saw a man and a woman, guilty of sin and on their way to an everlasting hell, and in his merciful love, he stooped to forgive one, and worked a miracle in forgiving the other. As far as drug use is concerned, there remains one key question. When are professing Christians going to stop pontificating about charity and kindness and start putting those principles into practice? Instead of asking coercive government to assume a moral responsibility it was never intended to take, we should be diligently seeking to aid those whom society views as disposable, unwanted or undesirable. I am reminded that for all our modernity there are still those in this country, like the homeless, and drug addicts of the Philippines, who I have seen with my own eyes, who still need our help both physically, financially, and spiritually. What of them? Will we leave them hung out to dry? Or will we use our freedom to help those in need, and to bring them the Gospel which God gave us and decreed that we should take to all mankind.
Tags: charity, constitution, drugs, health, history, marijuana, morality, prohibition
Norman Horn is the creator and primary writer for LCC. Learn a little bit about him in the 