Counterfeit compassion

Empathy is easy when it comes at everyone else’s expense

Our Congressmen love touting their compassion. From fighting cuts in Social Security benefits to saving kids in Africa from AIDS, there is no end to the virtue they display. But is it true virtue? Or just a bright Bat-signal of bollocks?

While they spend our hard-earned tax dollars on their artificial altruism, most of them are making millions on their $174k/year salaries. Why not, then, offer up their own money to satisfy their compassionate compulsion? Why not open their own wallets to fulfill their philanthropic phantasies?

It is easy to be eleemosynary with other people’s money. There is no personal pain in charity when others carry the cost.

This is common among the Hollywood haute as well. They bombard us with messages of munificence, yet how many pry open their purses to make their own donations?

Even the masses have been wooed to wail for the welfare of others, managed by government. The pearl-clutching and sky screaming over any potential paring away of government handouts is deafening.

Yet most never reach into their own pockets to perform these acts autonomously.

Instead, they prefer a reverse Robin Hood routine, having government take from the masses to wield for welfare. Robin Hood - at least in some stories, especially the Disney version - took from corrupt government that was taxing the people into poverty and gave that money back to the people from whom it was taken. The two are not the same.

Politicians like FDR believed otherwise. When he signed the Social Security Act of 1935, Roosevelt stated that “This law…will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy.”

This goes contrary to the notion that Social Security is not an entitlement. Yes, people pay in and expect to be paid out. However, if you read the preamble to the Act, it states that it is not only to provide for those who paid in once they are no longer able to work, but that it would enable “the several States to make more adequate provision for aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws.”

How noble! How greathearted! Take from some to give to others. This is a concept at the heart of Marxism; it is entirely foreign to the principles that drove those who built America. The founding fathers would not have approved of this mock method of magnanimity.

The men who created our country believed in liberty and individualism.

When a motion was brought to the floor of Congress to provide relief for French refugees who fled Santo Domingo, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, took the floor and said, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress to spend, on objects of benevolence, the money of its constituents."

Davy Crockett, after having been excoriated by a constituent for once having voted in favor of a $20,000 appropriation to provide aid for victims of a Georgetown fire, later made argument in Congress during consideration of a bill to appropriate $15,000 for the widow of a naval officer. As he stood, Crockett said:

Mr. Speaker–I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

Not Yours to Give

Those touting government welfare programs and government aid are doing little more than virtue signaling. They want government to take from you in order to provide for others who may lack. They themselves are (mostly) unwilling (or unable) to personally perform the unselfish acts they so claim to venerate, and they will force you to do so in order to comfort their consciences. It is a counterfeit form of compassion, followed by feigned furor when others threaten their precious programs.

Social Security, Medicare, FEMA, FDIC, USAID, etc. - while they all seem very noble are, in reality, an abomination to the Constitution. The federal government was never intended to function as a charity nor as an insurance company, nor should it now. These are things for which personal savings, private insurance, public charities, and religious organizations exist. It is to these, which are far more efficient and effective than a central government, that such endeavors should be left.