Staggering ignorance 2
August 13, 2008 – 6:37 pm by John- Unfortunately, the greater the humanitarian outreach, the greater the violence required to achieve it.
- —Ron Paul
At lunch today I overheard people talking about the ridiculous sums of wealth that athletes and entertainers accumulate, and they wondered what in the world those hundred-millionaires and billionaires do with all that money, and why do they feel like they need even more of it, and they praised Paul Newman and his wife for donating all of their Newman’s Own food profits to charity (praise I heartily echo). At the end of this mostly vacuous discussion, someone said, “If businesses were required to give 1% of their profits to charity, or even half a percent…how awesome would that be? How many problems could be solved with that?”
It would be so awesome that unemployment would go up, prices would go up, and investment in future capital would go down. It would create even more problems due to the regulatory waste and fascist sentiment that are necessarily associated with such a “charitable” endeavor. What other kinds of dirigiste government oversight would either accompany this forced charity or be justified by the same feelings that prompted this heinous idea?
According to Republocrats and other Statists, we all already give a large sum of our earnings to so-called charitable programs run by local, state, and federal governments, in the form of taxes, and we see what waste and counterproductivity result from that type of coercion. A growing economy, low taxes and regulatory costs, an abundance of jobs, and investment in the growth of businesses to create new and additional wealth are what lift the poor out of poverty and secure their futures. Regulation, redistribution of a static pool of wealth, and other coercion waste money, stifle growth, and breed dependence.