Know Limits

Government cannot legislate compassion and expect love to result; nor can government legislate love and expect to create a compassionate society.

Charity, and whether or not to give to a charity, is a private decision made by individuals. Government should never be in the business of charity. There is no such thing as “a generous nation.” Qualities like compassion, generosity, pride, contempt, despair are qualities that can only be expressed by individuals. There is no such thing as a collective brain. Only individuals can decide to be generous, and generous individuals have the right only to distribute wealth they have created. If you want an organized relief effort then all charity should be collected from willing, private individuals and distributed by private organizations.

People who know me and my current financial situation know that I have grown considerable debt since the birth of my twins and the slump in the real estate market. I owe thousands of dollars to members of my family. Without their help over the past months, I really don’t know how I would have made it. I’m sure I would not be living in this house. I am grateful for their help and look forward to paying them back. Clearly, I have benefited from their charity. But—the important thing is—I know I have no right to their charity. And nobody, however well-off they may be, however much blood or history we share, has a moral duty to be charitable to me.

I have the right to ask for assistance in any endeavor. I have no right to demand assistance from anyone.

In fact, no one has the right to demand your charity. Any doctrine that defines charitable giving as a moral responsibility or duty has rendered all giving immoral. Without choice there is no moral question to be answered. There is no difference between giving your money to the thug who has convinced you that his gun is loaded and the preacher who has convinced you that he knows what God wants you to do.

No government has the right to tax your productivity in order to do charitable work. Governments may tax in order to fund only the limited functions of government. They are: 1. To protect the governed from enemies foreign and domestic, that is, to protect the unalienable rights of individuals; 2. To settle disputes between and among free people pursuing their own self-interest in a free, capitalist economy.

Benjamin Franklin, when asked by a group of citizens what sort of government the delegates at the Constitutional Convention had created, replied: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ The republic survived two wars with the greatest power on Earth in its infancy, a bloody and destructive civil war fifty years later, and was on track to unprecedented greatness one hundred years after the convention, when Republican “trust-busters” began their assault on capitalism and the intellect. By 1910, great economic enterprises in the United States would survive only with the blessings of well-fed politicians. Shortly thereafter, government acquired the immoral power to tax the incomes of American businessmen and workers, turning free men into slaves of the state a few percentage points at a time. By 1940, Democrats, who wrongly blamed the Great Depression on capitalism [which had not existed in these United States for decades], had developed socialist schemes for the redistribution of the extorted wealth. With each step the politicians grew their power over the producer, and Americans mindlessly embraced a progressively more authoritarian government.

Nobody seems to fear the limitless government they are creating, this un-kept republic.