Is forcing someone to help a noble action?
Conservatives are often excoriated for not being caring enough about others. Yet it is interesting that many, though certainly not all, of conservatives are strongly religious. Does good religion not call for helping others?
The decision of whether to help another is very personal. It requires the person who is able to assist to make a judgment as to whether or not helping is in fact the right thing to do in a given situation. For example, if your child has gotten in trouble for doing something wrong, the parent needs to determine if bailing the child out is better than the child learning from the situation.
Progressives think that society should help others. They further believe that the government is in a unique position to ensure everyone shares “fairly” in the helping of unfortunate citizens. This approach of creating “charity” fails because of three primary reasons:
1. The person from whom money is taken from is further robbed of the opportunity of personnally embracing the idea of charity. Over time, the state taking on this responsibility encourages individuals to not feel the personal burden of helping others. I believe we see this effect at play in our society over the past several decades.
2. The assistance given out by a state agency cannot be based on individual judgment and experience. Instead, the agency must establish a complex set of rules by which its staff must follow in order to be consistent. This means that benefits are not handed out wisely and are wasted on situations that most ordinary citizens could see are clearly fruitless.
3. The recipient is also robbed of an opportunity for personal growth, because the process does not create accountability. The recipient just has to follow a set of rules, and they get the benefit. The net result is that recipients become experts at gaming the rules, instead of learning how to become more productive and useful to society.
So, we are faced with a decision as to who is more noble? It is the conservative who believes that charity is best done by the individual, which may result in some people not being helped? Or is it the liberal that believes the state must ensure no one falls through the cracks by forcing “charity” from its citizens?
This short clip from Reason.TV does a nice job making the argument for the freedom of the individual.
