I just read a blog post on this site:
http://theliberalmormon.blogspot.com/
The conclusion as to why the person became a liberal was because he heard the call of Christ to help your neighbors and love them. Interesting concept.
This is the interesting thing though, I think that any tidbit of information could back up any viewpoint. Where the rubber hits the road is in determining which viewpoints actually net the desired results.
I am a conservative (for many reasons) because I think the conservative approach makes it more likely for people to get the help they need. I think it is more effective and more food will get in the mouths of the most people.
A for instance:
I am emphatically against forced charity. I think it should be voluntary. The "goodness" or "badness" of our society is determined by the intents of our hearts and the love for our neighbor that we have. So if the government taxes us and redistributes the money we are still in the same spot that we were previously in. I don't think God will judge the world by how many mouths were fed, but by if we had a desire (and acted on it) to feed our neighbors. Forced charity is like no charity at all. I believe the words from the scriptures are that if you give a gift grudgingly it would be better if you never gave the gift at all!
I feel that if I redistribute my wealth (and I think almost all U.S. citizens have wealth!) it should go to who I deem is deserving of it. More importantly, the government redistributes wealth inefficiently. If you gave the government 100 dollars a very small portion of that would lead to getting food in someone's mouth. If individuals redistributed the money themselves 100% of the money would get into people's mouths. This is my biggest reason for despising taxes and forced charitable contributions.
Now clearly there are rebuttals to these premises. However, I feel as though overall, the net benefit of personal redistribution is greater than in forced distribution. You may get a little less money, but I think more mouths will be fed, and people will be empowered and have their eyes opened by having had such a personal experience in helping to alleviate the suffering of another. I think more often than not people hear that dems or other groups care about feeding the poor, that concept strikes a cord with them, and they decide they are liberal. I think quite often people hold on to slogans and sound bites which are given by political parties. I think many people wear the badge of a democrat because they feel it is the "nicer" political party. Their sound bites are convincing:
-we let people live how they want to live
-we love people
-we let people chose
-we care about actually helping people
All of these sound bites and slogans justify my position as a conservative. I think a further analysis is always needed to figure out which position really makes the most difference. If someone said they thought the liberal party made the biggest difference in people's lives I would disagree, but I would be fine with their position. But many people have no idea if their position leads to a greater amount of good being done or not -- they just like the way it sounds! They will wear the badges of all the previous slogans, hoping that it establishes their humanity and kindness, all the while not knowing the actual results of their positions. I can be included in this group at times, but I try and inform myself and figure out which position will bring the most net benefit.
How about you? Do you do the same? Or do you succumb to slogans and sound bites? I think the religious sound bites can sometimes be the most detrimental! It is my stance that more Christlike actions are accomplished by a historically more conservative approach. But I welcome dialogue.
Love you guys
3 years ago
2 comments:
This isn't really dialogue (mostly because, generally speaking, I agree with you), just a couple of thoughts.
I hope you got to see Arthur Brooks speak a few weeks ago. If not, I would highly recommend going to speeches.byu.edu and looking up his speech. I think it would add some more substance to the thoughts expressed in this post.
On the other side of things, Walter Benn Michaels came and spoke a week or two ago, and it was fascinating. He's extremely liberal (and I have some unexpressed, un-worked out thoughts about his liberalism and hypocrisy) but I left thinking that it is altogether likely that some liberal viewpoints are good, and should be implemented. I think the biggest danger is polarity. Anyway, Michaels was talking about the redistribution of wealth, and equal opportunity and all that. It was interesting. I wish I had a transcript of it (but it was off the cuff and I don't think anyone recorded it). I think you'd have found it interesting, whether or not you agreed.
It's also interesting that you brought this up today, because I have been in the process of planning a series of posts for my Faith and Theory blog that center around these very ideas, directly and indirectly.
Interesting stuff.
(count how many times I wrote "interesting" in this comment...)
One of my main problems with liberalism is what you touched on-- the idea that charity is the government's job.
There is a whole legion of problems to go along with this idea. For one thing, charity often needs to be enacted quickly, and speed is NOT the government's forte (for good reason, I might add).
Charity should also be efficient, which is another area that the government does badly. As you said, individuals can assure that 100% (or at least a very high percentage) of their donations can go exactly where they want it to, whereas if you were to give it to the government, it would pass through so many departments at so many levels that by the time it actually went somewhere, it would have been filtered through 50 employees' paychecks, various taxes, feasibility studies... everywhere but to the people you were actually trying to help.
Judgment is also a problem. Once the government is in charge of charity, it will be unable to distinguish between recipients who deserve the help and those who don't. Witness Obama's mortgage plan, where taxpayers pay the mortgages of people who are going into foreclosure. Obama promised that the money wouldn't go to "flippers" or to people who had bought property irresponsibly. But in reality, there is a) no mechanism for making either of those determinations in the actual wording of the plan, and b) no way on earth that the government would actually step up and say, "yes, individual A was irresponsible. No cash for you, come back one year". Such a determination would be labeled discrimination before one could blink.
One last thing. How responsible do you feel toward the government? When someone that you know and see on a regular basis performs an act of charity for you, you feel obligated to be grateful. If someone from your church comes and, say, cleans up your yard, you don't go out and dump all your trash in it the next day, or even the next week (or hopefully ever). You would be ashamed. For a LOT of people, though, there is no such sense of embarrassment towards the federal government, and even less to the anonymous taxpayer who will eventually foot the bill. The sense of moral obligation is often lost when the agent of charity is something as large, bureaucratic, faceless and annoying as the feds.
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