I’ve spent most of last night backgrounding this column. Honestly, it turned out to be a deeper dive than I’d planned, and required a good deal of going through my own archives for writings relevant to the point of this piece. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have over two decades of writings of scraps and links to refer to, much of which has gone offline with time, and is no longer available to anyone but myself. Thing is, digging through these files is a slower process than one would expect, particularly compared to using an online search engine. So here I sit, putting the finishing touches on this thing, coffee in hand. (Shrug) It’s OK. Sip happens. And, here we go.
Back in 2008, Peter Schweizer wrote in The Daily Mail:
George Orwell once wrote that politics was closely related to social identity. ‘One sometimes gets the impression,’ he wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, ‘that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England’.
Orwell was making an observation. But today a whole body of academic research shows he was correct: your politics influence the manner in which you live your life. And the news is not so good for those on the political Left.
There is plenty of data that shows that Right-wingers are happier, more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide – and even hug their children more than those on the Left.
I note with a shake of the head that the author of such a column written in today’s UK would likely be spending some time in the vertical bar hotel such as Belmarsh. Certainly, Orwell would be writing his great works from there. Given my observation yesterday that the UK is, in many ways, our Coal Mine Canary, I find this downright frightening. So I suppose I’d better get to writing the rest of this before the come and take me away for annoying some leftist somewhere.
The data that Schweizer talks about has been out there for years, of course, even yeas before he wrote his 2008 piece. So actually, the only thing that is shocking about it is how true his words have become. Beyond, I suspect, what he ever envisioned.
In the Sixties, we saw the beginning of a narcissism and self-absorption that gripped the Left and has not let go.
The full-scale embrace of the importance of self-awareness, self-discovery and being ‘true’ to oneself, along with the idea that the State should care for the less fortunate, has created a swathe of Left-wing people who want to outsource their obligations to others.
The obvious question is, outsource to where? The obvious answer is, they outsource it to government. Leftists feel they’re doing their part if they’re paying into a system ostensibly designed to maintain the poor at a minimum standard of living and solve all their problems. The fact that the government systems the left thinks so highly of does not even come close to doing so matters not at all, except to blame everyone but the left for under-funding those systems.
Ed Morrissey, over at Hot Air about the same time as the Schweizer piece, observes:
Because, remember: it’s selfish to think that you can distribute the wealth you earned more efficiently and intelligently than Obama and his small, elite group of policymakers. Why, look how well the government performed when it decided it knew better how to grant mortgages than the lenders themselves.
And no, that post of Ed’s is long gone, or I would be quoting more of it, and, of course, linking it. But I dragged this out of my personal archives because I want you to understand how central this one point is. Think of it, central planning… GOVERNMENTAL central planning, is behind all of what the Democrats propose, which translates directly to the use of YOUR money. I rhetorically asked yesterday if any of you had noticed that any solution the left comes up with involves someone else’s money. That concept is, in fact, the basis of today’s column. They’re very happy to support their worldview financially with tax money, but not their own.
Back in 2008, Patterico made note of this by way of the now-defunct BizzyBlog:
Looking at Obama’s charitable giving in since 2000 based on his tax returns, we find that Obama consistently refused to follow his own advice to “spread the wealth” when he had the opportunity to do so. This is especially true in years when he made nearly $250,000 or more. . . . [F]rom 2000-2004, Obama’s charitable giving was less than 1 percent.
His contributions increased after his book deal, to a maximum of 6.1% of income in 2006.
Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, was even stingier about spreading his wealth. When his tax records were released in September, they revealed that over the past decade he had only donated an average of $369 each year. In 2007, his charitable giving was only $995, or 0.3 percent of income in a year when his tax returns reported $319,853 in income.
You could probably add a number of zeros after the decimal point if we were to include the under the counter dealings of his we’ve discovered more recently.
By comparison, John McCain gave more than one-quarter of his income in 2006 and 2007 (28.6 and 27.3 percent respectively). And according to the New York Observer, since 1998, he has donated royalties on his books totaling more than $1.8 million.
You begin, I suppose, to detect a pattern. Let’s reinforce that perception. Back in 2008, we discovered that for all the money Obama was swimming in, (according to his tax records, some $250,000 in 2000), Obama’s aunt still lived in poverty in a Boston slum. For most people in the western world and its culture, charity starts at home. Not with Mr. Obama, who apparently figured the government would tend to such things. I mean, of course, leave aside the issue that she was an illegal alien. His family isn’t the only place he had fallen short in so far as charity goes. Obama’s charity giving, if we take his tax records as fact, amounted to less than 1%.
Similarly, Sam Youngman at The Hill reported at the time (again from my personal archives) that Joe Biden, who made millions, gave a grand total of $3300 to charity. Youngman reported then that Sarah Palin gave more to charity than Joe Biden. Well, heck, Sam, I could have told you that without looking at the records. In fact, I’ll tell you that even I gave more to charity than Biden did, again without looking. How do I know? A Democrat thinks charity is the work of government.
And why, if charity is the work of government, as they apparently believe, should they get personally involved and invested in charitable work? I wrote once about the charity work of Barbra Streisand, who gave LOTS of money to charity. As it happens, though, her idea of charity is a bit twisted. The largest recipients of her largesse are/were not organizations that feed the hungry, or house them – the cash goes to her version of charity… advocacy organizations such as the Bill Clinton Foundation. This is not unusual on the left.
Michael Moore, the rotund filmmaker, tended to give his charity money to film festivals, and he has been a large donor to the Lincoln Center. Despite spending a good hour looking, I’m not finding anything recent on his charitable giving, so who knows if he’s doing any donations to charity at all?
The more you examine these things, the more you recognize that the ideas of the left surrounding charity are completely nihilist. Supporting the poor and the needy is government work to the left, and the realm of government alone. They view charity not as supporting non-government engines that actually help the poor, but rather, to leftists, charity is supporting political groups that support their own worldview, with a feint toward helping people just so it looks good on the surface. The good Lord help anyone who dares look deeper, though.
John Stossel over at Town Hall wrote years ago:
But the idea that liberals give more is a myth. Of the top 25 states where people give an above-average percentage of their income, all but one (Maryland) were red ”conservative” states in the last presidential election.
“When you look at the data,” says Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks, “it turns out the conservatives give about 30 percent more. And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less money.”
Researching his book, “Who Really Cares” , Brooks found that the conservative/liberal difference goes beyond money:
“The people who give one thing tend to be the people who give everything in America. You find that people who believe it’s the government’s job to make incomes more equal, are far less likely to give their money away.
Then, there’s the glaring example of George Soros and that crowd. Some estimates have it that Soros himself is worth something like $10 billion USD. Do you suppose he MIGHT be able to get by on a few billion less and donate to those in need?
OK, I could go on with this for white a while. There are megabytes of clips on the subject in my files. But let’s shift to my own principles of charity.
As a Christian, I see the line drawn rather clearly that we are under a scripturally ordained responsibility to be charitable where it is needed… we as individuals… not the government. Not even as one church, or another. As individuals. Christ himself said:
” Give unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar’s and give unto God, that which is God’s.”
That is a rather thick line he’s drawing between charity and government. Confiscation is not charity, and it is certainly not the act of an individual. The taxes that fund such governmentally-driven “charity” are, in the end, collected at the proverbial point of a gun, and sometimes, not so proverbially. Absent governmental involvement, we tend to call such confiscation “theft,” or if you like, armed robbery. The left, meanwhile, tends to view such confiscation as a moral imperative.
I hold, as do most Americans, I think, that charity is the realm of God, and the individual….not of government…. Charity is people taking personal responsibility to helping their fellow man… not dumping it into the arms of government and hoping it all works out in the end. So long as the leftist isn’t bothered with the poor again, all is well.
The basics apply here…the government taking my money and spending it on someone else… even someone who arguably needs it, does not constitute “charity.” I submit there is a personal, one-on-one touch to charity that government, however well-intentioned, simply cannot provide. Government is not charity, government is force.
And so we see the loud objections from the left when government just now fails to provide food assistance, for example… ignoring, of course, the fact that it is the left that caused such problems by means of a government shutdown. A shutdown, I hasten to add, they caused because they want to provide free healthcare to illegals, thus straining an already sketchy healthcare system. I view the call for “free” healthcare for illegals as part of the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy. Clearly, their current actions serve the interests of their political goals, not their stated humanitarian goals.
I often write about culture here. We cannot ignore the idea that the left’s stated view of charity is the precise opposite of the traditional Western culture’s view of charity.
Look, they can give their money to whomever they please. It’s their money. I have no right to call them out on it, nor am I so inclined. I’m simply looking for some intellectual honesty about it. But when the left starts using the power of government to be dictating where the money of the rest of us goes, that is far more than a step over the line. It is theft, and it is also poor economic policy.
Then again, the left isn’t about actually helping Americans, and never has been, its claims notwithstanding.
The Schumer Shutdown is still ongoing, and polls are now showing Americans are increasingly blaming the Democrats for this mess, but we can’t let them spin their way out of it.
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