And yet, it's conservatives who spend their own money donating to soup kitchens and other such programs.
Nope. They spend roughly the same amount of money as everyone else, on average. Weighted for the offsetting benefit of tax deductions, they spend less of their own money donating to charity than liberals. There have been a lot of studies, here's the most recent:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2148033
The issue is government involvement Smash. You know darn well that even if we eliminated all food stamp programs tomorrow, not one person would starve to death in the US as a result.
No, actually I don't know that. People *do* starve to death in the US, but sure, let's stipulate that in the wealthiest nation on the planet, it's not a significant cause of death.
Food is so abundant, and private sources for those truly in need so readily available that there really is no need for the government to get involved.
It's hard to qualify "government involvement". We assume these "sources" are private not for profit ventures that receive not only special tax benefits from the government, buy almost all inclusively direct payments. Deductions to them have tax benefits, etc. In a direct capitalist system without these benefits there's nothing to indicate they would be as available. Nothing at all.
Liberals push for the government solution, not because it's needed, but because it's a government solution and they've been indoctrinated into the assumption that if we aren't solving a problem with a government program, then we just don't care.
Well, it could be indoctrination, or it could be the entire aggregate history of western civilization where massive social problems have *only* ever been solved by the state. It'd be great if Polio or Smallpox has been solved by a merry band of John Galts living in they're secret dirigibles and volcano lairs, but it wasn't. Large problems require large actors, and, yes, central planning. It'd be great if they didn't, if reciprocal altruism ruled the day and those with wealth and privileged acted on their own to help those without, but they don't. It'd be a lovely world if local distributed charitable organizations could provide services for the needy without additional funding and logistical support. They can't. I didn't make it that way, humanity made it that way.
Which leads us to invent problems for government to solve, but most liberals don't notice that either.
OF course we do. Everyone see that, idiot, but you've phrased it wrong. People invent *causes* for terrible things that happen, to the fill the vacuum they feel without them. Then "solutions" to the causes they've invented. Hence, kids shot with guns, let's ban guns. If the kids had been killed with a sword, we'd pass laws against swords. Of course it's not a solution, that's obvious. The benefit is the feeling that something has been done to prevent a similar tragedy. The fact that it won't is completely irrelevant. That's not the point. The point is that humans, generally, can't deal well with randomness. Thus God, thus fate, thus stupid laws. Everything has to have an explanation, even when there is none. Gun control laws wouldn't have prevented Newtown, but they would lower the rate of violent deaths in the US, as they have elsewhere. It's a stupid reason to pass possibly useful laws, which is how it works. The rational reason is never enough.
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