One of the tough things about supporting a free-market is that socialist and left-leaning thinking tends to monopolize caring about the poor in public discourse. Of course, many of my free-market brethren are not helping the cause because they actually don't care about the poor. Between these two factors, we get a misleading dichotomy that suggests that if you are left-wing you care and if you are right-wing you do not. On the surface, this idea is not entirely without merit. Left-wing individuals advocate having the government give money to poor people. How can they not be more caring than those who do not?
This where we get into the somewhat callous concept of net poverty. I want to stress that I call it callous because if I don't, someone else will, so I might as well just admit that a good chunk of the general public will see it that way. Net poverty is basically all of those that are poor today plus all of those that will be poor in the future. We ignore people who were poor in the past because there is really nothing a current action can do for them. This is a far more inclusive view of poverty and, in my opinion, a far more appropriate one. It realizes that the actions that we take today can either impoverish or aid the people of tomorrow. As such, it is a better method of weighing the pros and cons of any government action.
A net poverty analysis indicates that most government expenditure on charity will actually increase poverty in our society. While it reduces the number of people who are poor today, it also causes a drag on economic growth, which reduces the future affluence of a society. Thus, while the amount of current poverty is reduced, future poverty is increased. Clearly, from the point of view of reducing poverty, government spending is ill-advised.
Of course, there are plausible exceptions to this. What about cases where poverty is passed on by generations and a helping hand might be enough to make a family and its descendants? The response to this is twofold. First, how does a government identify which individuals would benefit from such treatment? A scatter-shot approach will end up slowing growth and creating more future poverty than it will prevent. Second, if the government can locate these people, why can't private organizations do so and offer assistance in return for some sort of future compensation, perhaps in the form of a fraction of that person's life's earnings? Private enterprise should be able to deal with exceptions like this, though it is difficult to discern any empirical data because our society is not designed to put such an onus on private individuals.
Finally, we have to deal with why private charity is so much better than public charity. After all, the money still ends up with the same people. What's the big difference? The difference comes from the message that these activities send. When an individual is choosing to provide private charity, he or she does so of free will, which means he or she has chosen to doing the work necessary to own the money that will in turn be donated. When charity is forced, the individual is having his or her funds diverted away from his or her choice of spending, which makes the individual less likely to work as hard to earn those funds next year. As such, forced charity reduces work done, which is where the claim that it slows growth comes from.
The point is that a right-wing approach is not necessarily less caring. In fact, I would maintain that it does a better job of caring, which is why I support it. People are always going to point out that there are poor people right now that we can be helping, and they are not wrong, but some methods of helping the people of today will hurt the people of tomorrow. Sometimes it is difficult to look in the long run, but if we want to be truly responsible for all those in need in our world, I feel we must.
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