Honorable mention goes to Doug Casey for “Charity and the Real Root of Poverty” :There is something to Trotsky's vision of man under communism. From all historical appearances, man under a totalitarian state functions differently than a man under liberty. And degrees of man exist as society slowly turns from liberty to slavery.
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One year, at the beginning of spring, a duck built a nest in the moat, under one of the many bushes. As her ducklings hatched and grew, it came time for them to search for water. However, despite their repeated attempts, the ducklings could not jump from the moat to the walkway bridge.
One of the [state agency] employees in the [government] building asked the building manager if he (the employee) could place a wooden ramp to allow the ducklings to waddle out of the moat. Being a good state employee himself, the building manager called the state department of natural resources for guidance. The answer: since ducks are migratory birds, no one could do anything.
The next morning, someone plastered official signs around the entrance, stating that any attempt to help the ducks was a violation of law. No ramp, no water, no food. And violators — you know this already — would be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
Soon we had a real scene. The mother duck would leave the moat and encourage her ducklings to follow. They couldn't, of course. She would march back and forth on the walkway bridge and quack in desperation. All the while, the guard at the entrance stood watch, stopping any attempt to help.
Repeated calls to the bureaucrats at the department of natural resources were answered by a repetition of laws and fines. And not one of the department employees was going to go against the rules, or even ask for an exemption, for any reason.
The ducklings died days later.
There you have it: upon joining the state, the department of resource folks — folks who likely dreamed of careers helping wildlife — became staunch bureaucrats enforcing rules over reason.
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Many proponents of socialized healthcare envision a system where their current providers remain, and society, hidden behind the state, pays the bills. But man changes by degree as liberty is lost. So the smiling doctor and caring nurse you trust will become the faces of the nomenklatura and apparatchiks. They can become nothing else.
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Your doctor and nurse, no matter how nice today, will become the bureaucracy. They will see you in terms of state rules and regulations. They will push you out into the cold rather than risk having you die on site — and them having to suffer the consequences of a bad report to the central authorities.
Of course, your beloved healthcare professionals will not change overnight from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. No, they will slowly change as the cloud of socialized medicine and accompanying bureaucracy incessantly rots their souls (as it rots our souls as well). It will happen — it has to.
To think otherwise is to be that mother duck, expecting officials of the state to rescue her ducklings because that is what employees of the department of natural resources are supposed to do: rescue wildlife.
Charities are largely counterproductive. Their main beneficiaries are not the intended recipients, but the givers. They get some tax benefits, but mainly they get the holy high of do-goodism. Frankly, the idea of charity itself is corrupting to both parties in the transaction.
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When money is given away, it’s almost as bad as government welfare. It makes it unnecessary for the recipient to produce, and that tends to cement him to his current station in life. The very act of making an urgent situation non-urgent takes away the incentive, the urgency, to improve.
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... There are people who genuinely want to improve themselves, but, for whatever reason, just can’t manage it on their own. But charity is not the best way to approach the issue.
Look, the basic point I’m making is that the best way to reduce the amount of poverty in the world is to create more wealth — as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
The essence of a charity transaction is to transfer wealth from those who have shown they can create it to those who have not shown they can. ...
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... [I]n most cases, poverty is not a function of bad luck.
It can be, sometimes, of course. Perhaps if you’re born in a country with a brutal and repressive regime, or if you’re born with mental handicaps — there are all kinds of things that can happen. But generally, with a few such exceptions, poverty is simply a sign of bad habits. In a relatively free country, it’s a sign of an inability or unwillingness to save, which is to say, to produce more than you consume. It’s a sign of a lack of self-discipline. Sloth that afflicts those not willing to learn skills they can sell to other people. It can be a sign of having no self-respect, as among those who spend all their money on drugs and alcohol, which are debilitating, rather than strengthening.
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Now, I’m not saying that if you know someone who needs a helping hand, and you feel good about helping — which is different from feeling guilty about not helping – that you shouldn’t do it. ... But when these things are institutionalized, they create distortions in the marketplace.
And when a big charity intrudes on one of these weakened, distorted markets, it usually adds even more distortions, prolonging the problem.
Consider these charitable organizations going around the world treating diseases. The reason these countries have these terrible diseases that kill so many people is because they are economically undeveloped. Keeping people alive via extraordinary measures in such a place only results in more people competing for the same scarce resources. The answer to the problem is not to send in teams of doctors, so that you’ll have even more destitute people producing no wealth, but to free the local market so the people can become wealthy. The disease will go away as a consequence — this is the only permanent cure. What they are doing is the exact opposite of what they should be doing; they are making things worse.
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Charity is especially prone to this problem [of counterproductive bureaucracy] because of the phony ethical notions that now seem to pervade Western society. It’s gotten worse over the last 100 years. People have come to believe that an instrument of coercion, the state, has to take care of them. Perversely, when the state engages in charity – which isn’t charity, because tax-supported giving is not voluntary — it discourages true charity. People who have money taken from them by the taxman have less of it to give to those they might know who genuinely need help.
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To me, charity should be strictly an individual, one-to-one thing. That’s the only way you can know that it can really help, and even then it doesn’t always work. Once you have to hire somebody to run a charitable organization and have secretaries and assistant vice-presidents in charge of light-bulb changing, it’s just another bureaucracy headed for disaster, dissipating wealth as it goes, and doing more harm than good even among the intended recipients of the charity.
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