The welfare state goes beyond this biblical paradigm. As first described by the noted sociologist William Graham Sumner over a century ago, the welfare state paradigm is: A and B decide how much to take from C to give to D. Today, there are many A’s and B’s calling for higher taxes on C, including many wealthy politicians whose tax returns reveal their personal parsimony in donating to charity.
Jesus understood that no man was morally qualified to dictate to others how much charity they should bestow, or what other good deeds another person should do. He rebuked the temptation to such officious do-goodism by pointedly asking, “…Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye” (Matt. 7:3)?
The correct answer for a Christian to give when asked, “Who bears the responsibility for doing charitable deeds?” is “I do.” Answers such as “the rich” or “society” are evasions of individual responsibility. It is not a Christian duty or prerogative to force others to join us in charitable endeavors. It is erroneous for us to suppose that we are doing God’s will by compelling or trying to compel others to do good deeds. We are accountable to God for what we do, not what we make others do. Paul teaches each of us to “work out [our] own salvation” (Phil. 2:12).
The Practical Superiority of Private Charity
From a purely pragmatic point of view, private, voluntary charity is far more efficient than government programs. This is not surprising, since private charities can spend only the funds that they can convince others to give them, whereas public officials have the privileged power of taxation. Legislators are all too willing to spend other people’s money and increase the national debt in order to woo voters by appearing to do good, while the bureaucratic imperative is to spend as much money as possible, since this is what induces Congress to increase an agency’s budget and expand its payroll.
The efficient use of scarce resources should be a primary concern of those who care about their fellow man. There remain countless unmet needs, and for every million dollars squandered through wasteful management, there will be that much less real wealth in society to educate the young, abate pollution, reduce poverty, create jobs, care for the sick, etc. The waste in the federal government’s antipoverty programs is mind-boggling. According to economist Edgar K. Browning’s 2008 book Stealing from Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit, in 2005 total government expenditures (national, state, and local) on 85 welfare programs totaled $620 billion, which translates to $67,000 of aid in one year for a low-income family of four. If the poor had actually received that much, obviously they would be far from poor, but the majority of that aid was consumed by bureaucratic overhead.
What makes private, voluntary charity more efficient is that the donors are closer—perhaps face-to-face—with the recipients of aid than is the case with massive government bureaucracies. Just as those who begged for alms in the Bible had direct contact with potential benefactors, who could judge for themselves whether the beggar was truly unable to provide for himself rather than a free-loader, it is far easier for private charities to screen out the helpless poor from the poor-by-choice.
Charity is abused when those who are capable of working, but prefer to accept a handout than lift a finger in productive labor, divert scarce resources from the minority of truly needy persons who are absolutely incapable of caring for themselves. There are those who assert that there are no “undeserving poor,” but the Bible contradicts this assertion. Proverbs 10:4; 13:4; 19:15; 20:13; 23:21; and 28:19, 22 all declare that moral weaknesses, such as laziness and foolishness, may be the cause of poverty.
