photo credit: Monjori
A couple of days ago I heard Jason Lewis on the radio talking about how socialism does not create wealth (after Obama’s “where opportunity is absent government must create it” comment it’s obvious that some people just don’t understand that fact) and that the only way that socialism can seem to work is if there are people in society selfishly creating wealth to be redistributed. While Jason started going on about how much better natural self interest is for society than synthetic altruism (my terms, not his) I began thinking that the right to be charitable is one that we must each earn in life.
As an example, I cannot donate a million dollars to help the relief efforts of Haiti. No matter how much I might want to I simply don’t have the money. There are other people who, through some combination of hard work and chance, have amassed a million dollars or more of money they don’t need for themselves and they can choose to donate that much money to help in Haiti. They have earned the right to make a decision about whether they will do something that generous, but I have not earned that right.
As I thought about it I realized that while we must earn any goods we might wish to be charitable with the choice to be charitable is one that anyone may make with whatever quantity of goods and skills they have acquired, whether they are objectively wealthy or not. The real catch between socialists and capitalists is that, unlike capitalists, socialists believe that it is possible for some person or group of people besides me to decide how charitable I should be with my goods. The socialists believe that the force of government should be used to enforce a minimum level of charity from each person in society whereas the capitalists think that each person in society should be free to make their own decisions about how charitable they should be with their possessions. Interestingly it is that capitalists that give more to charity than the socialists.
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