I'm going to apologize for rambling ahead of time, but a number of different thoughts have come out of the article on foreign aid to India, and it's kind of hard to remain topical and cover all of them in a single blog. So, forgive me a little repetition here, my integrity was challenged by a couple of our less tactful readers, and I feel compelled to defend it.
The contemporary argument of the American liberal is to hold that conservatives are lacking in compassion because they want to cut aid programs in their quest for fiscal conservatism. Nothing could be further from the truth. From Andrew Carnegie to Sam Walton, we find a long list of conservative philanthropists whose legacy of giving has long outlasted them. Granted, both of the above examples are not above some criticism, but, I would challenge, neither is any man alive.
The thing that liberals need to understand about many fiscal conservatives is that we value a dollar. Our compassion is greater than you realize, we just feel there are cheaper, FAR more efficient means of effecting compassionate relief where it is needed. In short, although I can't express it in accountant's terms, we believe in a greater net return in our investment. If I give a dollar to a homeless person, I want ONE DOLLAR to get to that homeless person, NOT 62 cents or 86 cents or even 98 cents. Anything less than a dollar is money wasted on a middleman, who I regard as, at best, profiteering off the misfortune of the less fortunate.
This is, in a nutshell, what I see as the biggest problem with our charity setup. The larger the collection infrastructure for charitable gifts, the more layers of bureaucracy are in place between the giver and the recipient, and fewer net dollars result from my gift. This creates a nice cottage industry for those who collect donations, and decreases the value of the dollar that I contribute. This is one of the many problems I have with the government's distribution system. The federal government, for all its best intents, is too large and complex a system for collecting and distributing aid dollars. Within the United States, the Fed's bureaucracy has to be paid, and all of the state, county, and local bureaucracy get paid as well. By the time everyone's stuck their hand in the till, what began as a very generous contribution becomes a pittance, and leaves the lower bureaucracies clamoring for more and more NET dollars, which mean that several times the amount collected must be raised to feed those higher up the food chain.
Another key issue is the issue of force. Without bragging, I would say that my annual contributions to the Salvation Army's kettles of a Christmas season have been substantial in proportion to our available cash. I love the bell ringers, and I think they bring something to the Christmas season that is a very unique slice of Americana. I would feel quite differently, however, if the bell ringer were holding a gun to my head, rifling through my wallet, and removing what THEY felt was a fair share. This is the problem with funding compassion programs through tax dollars; no matter how well intentioned they may be, someone's gonna feel they got mugged.
Last, but not least, I would like to address the issue of responsibility on the part of the recipient. While I would by no means begrudge a lower income family a little bit of extravagance if they can afford it, I feel that aid programs do not and cannot as structured go far enough in teaching the responsibility that is necessary if one is to have the hope of eventually going OFF of public assistance (long term obsolescence should be the goal of any aid program). Privately run organizations, because of their tendency to be more involved with aid recipients on a day to day basis, stand a far greater chance of teaching life skills that can get a person OFF of public aid programs eventually. I would far rather walk into a mom and pop store purchased through the assistance of aid programs funded by my tax dollars than I would see someone paying their way at the register with food stamps while they were wearing a leather coat and high dollar clothes.
So, before YOU go off the handle, and make assumptions about my position on compassion, go back and READ my articles. SEE what I have had to say on this and other subjects. I have never removed or hidden a single article, and this is the primary reason why.
Respectfully submitted,
Gideon MacLeish