“Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” – James Madison
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” – James Madison, the main author of the American Constitution
Our Founding Fathers, as Mr. Madison said in the quotation above, did not put “charity” in the Constitution as a responsibility — power — of Congress or the national government. Thus, the entire American welfare system is unconstitutional, and if anyone disagrees, please “lay [your] finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents” and point it out to me. And prove to me that you know more about the Constitution than the man who wrote it.
The Founders didn’t put “charity” in the Constitution for a quite obvious reason — if the government starts giving out free money, the lazy, shiftless, and selfish (which is far too many of mankind) will line up for miles to get as much of it as possible. And, worse, it might encourage those who are on the fence — in other words, would take care of themselves if necessity dictated, but tempted not to if free money is available — to slide over into the bum class and become unproductive. Don’t put temptation in front of people. That’s just common sense that we have completely forgotten in our secular, selfish, godless age.
In other words, to the brilliant and wise men who wrote our Constitution, government “charity” would produce the exact situation we see in America today: waste, fraud, abuse, and an inflationary monetary system that hurts the hard-working, diligent American — the kind of people a country should want and seek to produce. But rather, we now have a huge parasitic class that drains much-needed resources from society and adds nothing to its production. To our Founders, people, first and foremost, are to take care of themselves and their families, and not look to government to do it.
But times have changed, and we simply live in an age when so many expect government to solve all our problems (New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said it should), so we give it massive amounts of our money. That’s just the “zeitgeist” we’ve been trained to believe; thus it is the accepted, and unquestioned, norm today. Any mention, for example, that people should be allowed to privatize their Social Security or Medicare is immediately met with horrified, cacophonous shrieks of protest by government lovers — and parasites — and never even gets out of the batter’s box, much less to first base. Government is supposed to take care of the “poor”; that’s just accepted “wisdom” today.
But it shouldn’t be government’s responsibility to do our work for us. There are some things government can do very well (like oppress and kill people), but charity is best left in the hands of individuals who are close enough to situations to direct it where it truly needs to go. It isn’t in the least surprising that America’s government “benevolence” is in such a catastrophic mess; that institution (government) is wholly unequipped to prudently handle it. And, of course, it’s also purely political now.
For example, the American government has priced the greatest healthcare system in the world almost beyond reach of average citizens — with concomitant massive waste and fraud — and the more power over that system government gains, the worse it will become. But government has made healthcare, through laws, regulations, strangulation, etc., so expensive that it is about the only entity now that can afford the costs. That’s exactly what totalitarians want — you dependent upon them, not free to make your own choices and pay for them yourself.
The Democrats love it. If the government is to do all the work, it must have as much of the money, and hence, power as possible. And the Left is about nothing if not about government power. It is also why the Left has done, and is doing, everything it can to destroy the nuclear family. If there is no family to take care of a person, then it has devolved upon government to do it. That isn’t the way it should be, but that’s the way we’ve been taught to think. And too many churches, which should be involved in benevolence, are too busy pleasuring themselves with their multi-million-dollar cathedrals and playpens to do the true work Christianity enjoins upon them. If government is going to do it, why should churches bother with it?
But we’ve ignored Mr. Madison; we’ve rejected our Constitution, common sense, and history, and so we have the bloated, fraudulent disaster that our welfare state has become. Not to mention that millions of people, from all over the world, have come to America to benefit from it. Our Founders knew this would happen if we put charity in the hands of government. Free money is one of the greatest attractions in the world to anybody, but especially to a sub-class of sloths and societal riff-raff with no virtue and who only wish to parasite off others. Nearly every human society in history has had them; current American government policy simply makes it easy for them to exist and expand. And it will eventually bankrupt and destroy the nation. We reap the ignorance we’ve sown.
The genuinely “needy poor” do exist, of course; they always have and they always will, and every religion in the world tells its individual adherents to take care of them, not the government. Jesus never told us to perform our Christian responsibilities through government. We, individually, are to do it.
But, individually, we tend to fall short of this great duty because government inflation has made it increasingly difficult to even provide for ourselves, much less help others. Just what the totalitarian left ordered.
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