If you were to win $1 million, and you wanted to use all of it to help the needy, would you a) donate the money to your favorite charity, b) hand it out to people on the street, or c) send it to the Illinois Department of Human Services?
Government programs rest on the presumption that we, as individuals, are incapable and/or unwilling to care for ourselves and those around us. We have been conned into believing that without government assistance people would be suffering from poverty or hunger or illness. So we continue to vote for those politicians who tell us that they will solve these societal problems. Yet we continue to see poverty, and we still see hunger, and we still see untreated illness. We have been tricked into judging bureaucratic programs based on their promised benefits, rather than on their tangible results.
This is not to say that our bureaucratic politicians are bad people. I would assume that their intentions are good when they promise to help those in need, when they promise to use their office to spread good will. But when our politicians tell us that they will help people, they are really saying that they will forcibly take money from you and me, to dole out to the programs that they deem worthy. In other words, they are telling us that we are incapable of helping our neighbors, and that we must instead trust our money with them, these same politicians who have not exactly built a sterling reputation for integrity.
It is wrong for anyone, especially a politician, to confiscate what is yours, give it to someone else, and call it "compassion." Government’s role is to promote the “general welfare.” Government has no mandate to promote special interests, to promote some people at the expense of others. If our politicians want to be charitable, I fully support them – outside of the political arena and with their own money.
But when our politicians declare that they will use their office to help some particular group, it does not matter how good their intentions are because, in the end, this is not compassion – this is thuggery and tyranny.
Truly, do you think that a bureaucracy can be more compassionate than you? That it can be more charitable than you? Bureaucracies cannot help people – only people can help people. And compassion that is not voluntary is not compassion at all – it is coercion. We need to take our resources back from government bureaucracies and return them to the people, where we can put them to good and efficient use.
