Charity vs obligation

When there is a right to food, shelter and other items, there is also the duty of everyone to chip in to pay for that right to be guaranteed to the people that need it.  When that happens it becomes an obligation.  Many people find obligations to be too hard to keep up.  They start to resent the people (government) ‘forcing’ them to comply.  Charity on the other hand makes people feel good about helping others.

If we truly want to help those in need, wouldn’t it be better to have these needs in the hands of charities?  The government can help by not taxing the lands used for homeless shelters and other housing for those in need.  What about the ‘soup kitchens’?  Should they be tax exempt?  Should they be located only close to the homeless shelters or should they be spread out so that even those that have a friend putting them up can manage to get to the soup kitchen easily?

There are tales from the 1930’s of families sleeping in church pews, little children and grown men alike.  This was a terrible time for people in need.  We have corrected this issue by giving housing vouchers to people in need, but the number of people in need keeps rising.  With the expansion of technology and the automation on not only manufacturing, but also education (computers providing homework and online lectures), and invention (computers are now designing faster, smaller and cheaper computers), fewer jobs are going to be available to fewer people.  This will snowball the need for assistance.  More people will need more help than ever before.  How will we help them?

We need to reduce the numbers of those in need.  Voluntary population-growth control has been shown not to work.  Involuntary population-growth control is inhumane and an unacceptable answer.  Thomas Malthus posited other methods of population growth control, most of which are quite unpleasant.  Perhaps there are other methods that haven’t yet been given serious consideration.

There are so many questions to be asked and answered regarding social welfare that you will see these topics showing up in the blog on an occasional basis.  By putting questions out there, perhaps someone will find a workable solution.

Remember, this is a conversation, not a one sided lecture.  Please respond either by posting comments, or if you actually know me then you may respond in person.

More to come in a later post.