One page after the champagne ad [in the New Yorker], we see a photograph of a smiling older white man, with the caption, “He loves helping kids. So he gives.” He calls on the reader to “give something back to the world.” My blood pressure rises when I see ads like this, because it goes to the larger problem of charity in America nowadays. If the system worked as it should, and if rich people paid their fair share of taxes, then the rest of us wouldn’t need to beg them to peel off a piece of their income and toss it back to the people.Why count on people to give when you can just take?
The problem with charity
Have you ever wondered why it does no good to point out to leftists that conservatives give more to charity than progressives?
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I think they just can't do arithmetic. Or more subtly, they don't believe that the numbers derived from real events describe reality. They don't like numbers. They don't believe them. They can't put them in context. They weren't good at them in school and are suspicious that there is some trick involved.
They believe stories, especially stories that are about feelings.
Ms. Occasio-Cortez's Twitter team (since she clearly no longer writes the things herself) is passing a fiction about the military having billions in accounting errors that could 'almost' pay for her "Medicare for All" socialized medicine scheme.
Well, except, even if it were true that the military has somehow had those accounting errors over however many decades, sunk costs are sunk. You'd have to largely eliminate the military to ensure that no future accounting errors would occur on this scale (assuming the truth, again, arguendo). That's really the discussion: do you want to be the world power, or do you want to provide health care to everyone no matter what it costs?
Now I think they'd really rather disband the military, open the borders, and provide unlimited benefits to anyone who came and asked. If resources were unlimited and the world weren't dangerous, that might be a noble thing to do. But resources are limited; the national debt is climbing rapidly and will need to be serviced; and the world is a lot more dangerous than they believe it to be.
So... well, I guess that's just a long-winded way of agreeing with AVI. They don't like the numbers, and they think there's some trick about them. We do too, of course, with the 'global warming' / 'climate change' schemes. At least one of us is right.
It's all about the feelz. They aren't considering sunk costs or defense policy or even health care policy, really. This is not analysis of data or even an ex post check on whether a desired outcome is possible given real world scenarios. They are using language they have absorbed to rationalize a predetermined position that was not arrived at by logic, just like South Pacific islanders building a grass hut control tower with bamboo antenna and putting torches along a strip of cleared jungle in hopes that planes bringing Spam and chocolate will return.
building a grass hut control tower with bamboo antenna and putting torches along a strip of cleared jungle
Well, there is a form of magic that relies on making simulacra of things in order to get power over them or to get the things themselves or both.
Maybe that's what the Left is doing, rather than nakedly relying on feelz.
Eric Hines
This particular phenomenon is simpler than that, I think. The author's peeve is that he hates listening to rich people advocate voluntary giving, because he thinks if we just forced them to contribute, we wouldn't have to ask them nicely or embarrass ourselves being grateful. He associates charity with begging but forcible income redistribution with supporting his own human dignity. Notice that he seems barely conscious of any duty in himself to step up giving to anyone less fortunate.
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