How Not To Help The Poor

Interesting response to the religious left here.

Liberals like Colmes believe that redistributing wealth by taking it from the rich and giving it to the poor will create an equitable society. This is the great liberal myth. Taxing policies designed to create social programs inhibit economic expansion in the business sector. Without an expanding economy, businesses can’t grow. If businesses can’t grow, they cannot hire new workers.

Liberals believe that the remedy for economically displaced workers, a condition their policies often create, is to raise more taxes and subsidize the unemployed. This is state-sponsored slavery under the guise of compassion. It has the effect of squelching the incentive to work and creates a perpetual underclass that is constantly appealed to by liberals so they can stay in power. Those dependent on the State most often vote to increase the power of the State out of self-interest.

DeMar argues that, laying aside the issue of whether or not Jesus’ teachings demand an all-powerful, confiscatory central government in order to “help the poor” via wealth redistribution and magisterial enforcement of whatever “social justice” cause du jour happens to be currently popular, such things as wage and price controls and overregulation wind up hurting the very people that those who champion them say they’re trying to help – so from a purely practical point of view, the kind of liberal utopia that the Religious Left is trying to build is the very last thing you’d actually want to establish if you really wanted to help those who are struggling.

Not that those who’ve imbibed the Left’s Kool-Aid will be swayed; they have hitched their wagon to Obama’s train and, unlike the majority of the Religious Right (and in what can only be considered the very height of irony), who unhesitatingly light into the GOP they are often (and inaccurately) lumped in with, they seem unwilling and/or unable to critically examine their presuppositions or to honestly appraise their Messiah’s positions and records.

Ah, well.

Good article, nonetheless.  Not bad for a Calvinist preterist postmiller.