But if you read the Prophets, it includes the dictum that princes should care for widows and orphans, and be kind to foreigners “because you were once strangers in Egypt”.

So there are reasons some of us think that this means that a good government should run a social umbrella for the poor…and welcome immigrants.

When the government helps someone, it is not “charity” it is “welfare” or “the dole”. Charity is voluntary. Welfare is coercive redistribution.

Let me give you an example. If I see that my neighbor is hungry, I have two choices: I can help him or not. If I choose to help him, I engage in charity. What governs my choice? My estimate of his worth and the degree to which I feel his suffering is an injustice. If his house burnt down or someone robbed him, if he had some unfortunate illness, or if the factory that employed him was shut down for its carbon footprint- if he was a victim of some circumstance not of his own making and was working to get out of it- I am likely to choose to assist him gladly. This assistance is not my grudging performance of duty, but my benevolence and love for my fellow men- which I feel to the degree of their personal virtue. However, if I see that my neighbor drinks away his paycheck, destroys his property through indifference and negligence, can’t hold down a job because he doesn’t show up or is incompetent- if i see that he slept through school, never cracked a book and is generally a no-good jerk- my choice is likely to let justice take its course and not to stand between him and the consequences of his own actions.

In this way, voluntary individual charity reinforces virtue among citizens. Even charity must be paid for, and the payment is personal virtue. You earn charity by deserving it. But, the shiftless and rotten won’t stand for that, will they? Not when the government stands eager to give them money property and services based on their need, not on their character.

We have implemented a system by which my neighbor demands charity as his right, as his due. He demands not only cash in an emergency but payments year round and lifelong- from universal pre-K to “free” health care to food stamps to corporate bailouts. The powers we gave to the government to assist “the poor” with these alleged rights are the same systems that are used for welfare to corporations with political pull, and that enable wealth to be taken for the unearned benefit of foreign indigents and friendly dictators alike. We’ve violated property rights, and it has become a game of who can grab the most before he is voted out and replaced with the opposing gang.

Government “charity” goes over the heads of the individuals who earn and produce- it invalidates their judgement about who is deserving and who is not. It FORCES some men to involuntarily sustain the lives of others. It is an attempt to get by force what they could never get voluntarily. It enables my crooked and lazy neighbor to get from me at the point of a gun the wealth and services I would never give him otherwise. It enables him to go on being crooked and lazy without end, without consequences, without facing moral judgement from those who are supporting him. It’s worse then outright theft- a burglar at least acknowledges that I own my property and that he is engaged in thieving- he sneaks around, hopes I won’t catch him, and grants that the police have the right to capture him, punish him, and return my property to me. But the welfare recipient claims his loot by right- he’s not stealing his bread, assisted housing or health care from me directly and so does not acknowledge it as theft. He receives it safely laundered through the magic of having it extorted from me by a third party, the taxman.

He is absolved of considering me at all- whether that money could buy me an extra meal or my children’s education or pay for my funeral- he doesn’t have to care where the money came from or to consider my needs- only to proclaim his own needs and demand assistance by right. He doesn’t have to look me in the eye and ask for help. He doesn’t ask my consent at all. He doesn’t have to think of where the money came from; whether I worked overtime to earn it, whether it was my inheritance or whether I saved it penny by penny through a lifetime of scrupulously competent labor. The welfare recipient doesn’t have to consider me in the slightest- I am safely offstage, out of sight, out of mind. I am not present to judge him, to question him, to estimate his worth. He takes my money without having to deserve it. He takes my money without even the necessity of having to say “thank you”.

That is the whole motivation and result of your government programs: to remove ever more freedom, gratitude, justice, consideration, friendship, judgement, morality, virtue, and reason from this world: to enable lazy men to evade the fact that things in this life are ultimately paid for by work, by virtue, by ambition and thought. To take with guns what justice will not render.

I suggest you rethink the nature of charity and ask yourself whether you are actually helping people or whether you are corrupting the concept and hurrying the destruction of everything good, benevolent and just in this world.