Get government out of the charity business ~ By Star Parker

Star Parker to lawmakers: Don't try to fix programs, just end them

According to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report and the staff of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who commissioned the report, combined annual federal and state spending on anti-poverty programs exceeds $ 1 trillion. About 75 percent comes from the federal government.

These funds, which include programs such as welfare, food stamps, low-income housing programs, child-care assistance, etc. are programs that mostly came onto the American scene with the War on Poverty and, in that they are focused on helping the less fortunate, are what it is usually considered charity.

These programs are notoriously wasteful and are too often counterproductive and motivated by political gain rather than genuine desire to really help people.

Funds extracted from taxpayers, dispensed by bureaucrats, under rules and conditions designed by other bureaucrats, remove personal responsibility from both the giving and receiving ends of the equation.

Without any doubt in my mind, Star Parker explains what the problem is, and how to solve it, all in one column.  Poverty itself is not the problem.  Handing out entitlements has only enabled the recipients to bring about generational poverty.  The ambition to get oneself off of the poverty train by their own efforts has been replaced by a willingness to accept handouts. 

Our Founding Fathers understood that concept.  They had no intention of creating a government so willing to become the charity for the people.  The Founders understood the true concept of charity where people who have prospered would willingly contribute to the well-being of all citizens in need.  They knew that real charity was not a forced-giving program through taxes confiscated from a portion of income.  Americans, they knew, had love in their hearts, and wouldn't let people simply starve to death.

By all means, the statement by the farmer to Davy Crockett was what should have been remembered: “You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and favoritism and corruption, on the one hand, and robbing the people on the other.” That's an intelligent analysis by the farmer, but I wish he would added,"But once the government becomes a charity, it will never be able to be reversed, just like the income tax. (Not even with a Republican Congress!?)"

As Star so aptly put it a week ago:

One of President Ronald Reagan’s most famous quips was that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

It is indeed sad that America today is plagued, indeed threatened, by the very institution it invented to protect its own citizens:  Government.

It wouldn't be so dismal to think about the future of America if a few more people were aware of this.  There could still be hope, but I'm not holding my breath, not even with the Republican landslide in the 2014 Midterm election  Just sayin'...

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Get government out of the charity business

Star Parker

By Star Parker

Published: December 12, 2014

From wnd.com Commentary

The story is told that when Tennessee frontiersman Davy Crockett served in the U.S. Congress (between 1827 and 1835) he voted for a bill appropriating $20,000 for relief for victims of a fire that broke out in Georgetown.

When he returned home, a constituent farmer chastised him for supporting the bill and for “giving what is not yours to give.”

The farmer told Crockett the Constitution does not grant Congress the power to give charity, and if it did, “You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and favoritism and corruption, on the one hand, and robbing the people on the other.”

We are far from those days. Supreme Court decisions over the years have opened the door for rationalizing just about anything under the spending authority of the Congress.

Those who crafted the U.S. Constitution did not intend limitations on the federal government’s role out of mean-spiritedness. They did so out of a sense of what would best serve the public.

It stands to reason that bureaucrats spending other people’s money – funds taken by force – is not going to produce good results.

~~~ READ MORE on wnd.com Commentary ~~~

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