TOSSING CURVES :

The Wealth of America-Part III (Mark Byron, June 13, 2002)

The basis for my economic philosophy rest between two Biblical pillars: the desire to help the poor and the acknowledgment of man's sinfulness. [...]

Helping the Poor- It's fairly clear that God wants the needy looked after. This leads many godly people towards a more socialist worldview, as they strive to help the poor by enlisting the government in the process. Jesus did say, "The poor you will always have with you," but the context was of worshiping Him while He was still here, not of the futility of helping the needy. Some level or redistribution of wealth is needed, and I'm not quite ready to go the libertarian route of letting charity and the private sector handle everything. We may debate how to help the poor and how much, but whether to help at all is not a valid question for the believer.

Though hesitant to delve too far into theology, which I know far too little of to speak with any confidence, I wonder if perhaps Dr. Byron does not put his foot wrong here. I'd note first of all the far too passive construction "God wants the needy looked after" which renders almost esoteric one of the core obligations that God imposes on us. God does not merely want, He commands : Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

Yet the modern social welfare state allows us to fulfill this obligation at several removes. It allows us to "care" for our neighbors without love ever entering the equation. After all, what am I paying taxes for if not to house the poor, feed the hungry, etc? Haven't I shown myself to be concerned? Aren't the needy being looked after? And in paying these taxes, haven't I fully discharged my obligations, regardless of whether this system is, in the long run, in the best interest of the poor? Why need I be personally involved with the needy having already given them my money?

As in so many things, the clearest vision of the dangers of such a system belonged to Alexis de Tocqueville, who said the following in his brilliant Memoir on Pauperism :

[I]ndividual alms-giving established valuable ties between the rich and the poor. The deed itself involves the giver in the fate of the one whose poverty he has undertaken to alleviate. The latter, supported by aid which he had no right to demand and which he had no hope to getting, feels inspired by gratitude. A moral tie is established between those two classes whose interests and passions so often conspire to separate them from each other, and although divided by circumstance they are willingly reconciled. This is not the case with legal charity. The latter allows the alms to persist but removes its morality. The law strips the man of wealth of a part of his surplus without consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share his wealth. The poor man, on the other hand, feels no gratitude for a benefit that no one can refuse
him and that could not satisfy him in any case. Public alms guarantee life but do not make it happier or more comfortable than individual alms-giving; legal charity does not thereby eliminate wealth or poverty in society. One class still views the world with fear and loathing while the other regards its misfortune with despair and envy. Far from uniting these two rival nations, who have existed since the beginning of the world and who are called the rich and poor, into a single people, it breaks the only link which could be established between them. It ranges each one under a banner, tallies them, and, bringing them face to face, prepares them for combat.

We see the truth of this in many ways. Mr. Byron mentions Christ saying "the poor you will always have with you". But this is no longer true. To an astounding degree we no longer come in contact with the poor. They don't live in our neighborhoods. They don't ask us for money on street corners. We don't feed them or house them or clothe them ourselves. We've got government bureaucrats to deal with all these messy chores. We can fulfill our obligation without getting down in the muck, so why would we? I don't believe the lament of the Left that the wealth gap between rich and poor is getting worse, but I know that the physical gap has never been greater. I haven't so much as seen a truly destitute person since moving out of Chicago. I certainly don't have any regular contact with any one who is truly desperate.

I know, I know, I could go work at a shelter or a soup kitchen and see that I have neighbors in need. But don't I pay taxes so that someone else will do that for me? I recognize how selfish this is of me, how un-Christian. And I know that there are many good people, far better than I , who are out there every day doing good works. But how many of you, even the church goers among you, have any time recently come in significant contact with a poor person and helped them, with your own two hands? I suspect the answer may be : not too many.

Nor do I seek to needlessly condemn myself, nor the rest of you, for I do not think we're uncaring in this. We are merely men after all and having worked our three or four months of the year to pay our taxes, who's to say we aren't entitled to say we've done enough. We do not do less than for the poor than those who came before us. We are not cheap--we are more generous than any people have ever been. We are not become bad people. Rather, we are all of us products of a social structure that, under the guise of charity, has created a tremendous distance between ourselves and those we are commanded to love. And this is of course only one manifestation of how modernity establishes these barriers. Others include the break down of the nuclear family and of the extended family, the decline of churches, neighborhoods and voluntary associations, etc. Our lives are generally more atomized than they have ever been before; this just may be particularly noticeable as regards our interaction (or lack of such) with the poor. We share readily of our wealth; it is our selves that we are loathe to share. But, it is the self, not the purse, that is implicated in the commandment to love each other.

If we are too live up to the obligation that God imposes then, we will have to reverse this trend, will have to become less dependent on government and more dependent on one another. And note, it is not just the poor but the wealthy too who have become dependent. We too consume unemployment benefits and retirement monies and send our parents off to retirement homes and the like. And we get all of these benefits without so much as a please or a thank you, as largesse to which we're entitled. No one is grateful for a Social Security check; they think, perhaps rightly, that they earned it. And if they will receive more than they ever put in, well so be it. They paid their taxes--they want their money. And when I got my student loans, did I pause to consider how blessed I was or what duties it imposed on me? Not on your life. And when I lost my job and applied for unemployment, did I think : thank you, fellow citizens, for making this money available to me? Pshaw. I thought : finally I get back some of what I'm owed.

But imagine a different world, an older world : where our parents live with us in their later years; where I help my neighbor when his house burns down; where we don't just write our checks to the government and feel our obligations are fulfilled, but are thrust back upon each other and must help each other deal with life. Imagine that when I need help I have to ask for it and you have to either say yes or no, to me, knowing that next week it may be you who need help. Imagine the moral obligation this kind of interaction places upon me as the recipient and the moral weight you must reckon with if you say no. Imagine that the assistance the poor receive came from their friends and neighbors and fellow church members and other local institutions, all of whom were there offering help but at the same time keeping an eye open--imposing a duty on the recipient to do their best and to be equal to the assistance they've received. Imagine that you and I actually had to see how the other half live, the challenges they face, the hardships they have to overcome.

This world, let's be quite honest, is repellent to us. We don't particularly want a house full of family--we want our "space". We don't want to have to ask for help--we want someone to have to give it when told to. We don't want to be asked for help by some smelly homeless person or some white trash unwed mother--we want some agency with an acronym to deal with it. We don't want to have to go to church and to neighborhood groups and to PTA meetings and to Masonic Lodges and Bowling Leagues and all the rest, just to re-develop the network of community that once served where government now stands. We want to pay our taxes and be left alone, so very alone, in our own splendid isolation..

But as we look around us, at the nation we've become and at the kind of people we're becoming, mightn't it be time to ask ourselves if we're really well served by our distance from each other? Isn't it possible that the psychic and physical violence we increasingly find ourselves perpetrating against one another--from divorce to abortion to euthanasia to road rage to workplace and classroom shootings and all the myriad little ways in which our society has become routinely profane and abrasive and discourteous--is a function of this distance that we maintain from one another and that our current social structure, which enables us to depend on government instead of on each other, is a major contributor to the problem? Would I treat you in such a manner if I needed you, which, thanks to government programs, I don't?

Finally then, this leaves us to consider the possibility that both axes upon which we might graph the Byron Curve may in reality represent detrimental effects of government on our society. If every additional dollar we spend on social services ends up not merely being ineffective in alleviating the suffering of the poor but also distancing us further each from the other then we may have to reconsider the whole thing. If the overarching effect of social spending is to create a social structure in which the primary relationship is between the individual and his government, while destroying the sinews of pre-existing non-governmental relationships, we're in real trouble. Our best intentions (as reflected by the willingness to transfer money from the wealthy to the poor through the medium of government) may turn out to lead us into a world in which there is a high level of well-being (defined as a purely socio-economic matter) but where there is no love, for each of may depend solely on the government for our care and sustenance and one can't love a government. We may create a world that's filled to overflowing with joytrons, but which is devoid of Joy. Is not such a world the very approximation of Hell?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 15, 2002 2:37 PM