Compassionate Conservatism

By Robert Fischer | Published: March 19, 2006

This started out as a response to bhurt-aw‘s post, but it’s enough of a tangent that it deserves its own entry. So here goes.

In Peggy Noonan’s article, she is distressed by Bush’s non-conservative stance. Conservatism, by its very nature, is reluctant to grow the government or increase spending. Bush doesn’t seem be reluctant at all to grow the government or increase spending — Hell, he’s increased it even faster than Clinton (check the last link). So he’s certainly not a conservative.

Now, both Brian and the link make the following argument:

Now Peggy Noonan and the rest of the plastic Republican chattering teeth did not think back in 2000 that Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” meant that he was a spender, they thought it meant that he was a liar–and that they were in on the con.

  1. Highball estimates of future budget surpluses in order to make it look like there’s more room for tax cuts than there was.
  2. Lowball the costs of the tax cuts by telling people that the AMT will be repealed when you calculate the magnitude of their tax cut and yet keeping the AMT in effect when calculating the revenue cost of the tax cut.
  3. Call yourself a “compassionate conservative” to convince voters you don’t want to make elderly emphysema patients front the money for their oxygen cylinders.
  4. Then, when deficits reemerge, say: “Oh. What a surprise. We have to cut way back on federal services and programs after all.”

At least in my case, I didn’t ever know about this “con”. In fact, nobody did — Peggy Noonan and the whole Manhattan Institute weren’t in some kind of con, they were subscribers to a genuine belief that I happen to share. Bush signed onto compassionate conservative as the campaign geared up and signed off shortly after his initial faith based initiatives had been implemented: in short, the change came because he was handed the new horse of “national security”. But, since compassionate conservatism is being attacked as a con, I feel the need to explain exactly what it is.

First, let’s take a look at what Peggy Noonan has to say about it in that article:

I understood Mr. Bush to be saying, when he first came on the national scene, that he was the kind of conservative who cared very personally about the poor and struggling, who would take actions aimed at helping them, and that those actions would include promoting policies aimed at keeping the economy healthy and capable of pumping out jobs. I also understood Mr. Bush to be saying–and he often said it–that he meant to allow and encourage faith-based programs that helped young men who were getting in trouble with, or at risk of getting in trouble with, the law. It was clear by at least the 1990s that local programs run and staffed by the religious and their organizations had a higher rate of success than did programs that excluded religion. Under Mr. Bush, the feds would no longer funnel money exclusively into nonsectarian programs. The inner-city pastor would now be able to get a portion.

Compassionate conservatism is the political application of the belief that people deserve to be empowered — that people do best when they are given dignity and opportunity, and that people are personally hindered by systems (like welfare) that encourage them to be passive recipient of a huge system. An idea like workfare, which encourages people to be a contribution to the economy instead of external to it, is a keen compassionate conservative idea. Entrepreneurial drives and an opposition to McJobs are fundamental to the compassionate conservative idea, because it is important that people have the opportunity to acheive a position that their drive and capability can reach. Compassionate conservatism differs from liberalism in that it favors pro-active, non-governmental support structures (like churches, ethnic and neighborhood community centers, etc.) instead of governmental support structures. But a compassionate conservative does have the same general focus as liberals traditionally do, which is why liberals can’t really understand it — they assume that since conservatives haven’t traditionally suggested solutions to their problems, their solutions are the only reasonable ones. This is just a flat-out conceit born out of the academic basis of liberalism, and it’s one of the things that annoys me the most about liberals.

Related posts:

  1. No Such Thing as a Moderate Republican, Part III
  2. McCain is Bush’s Man
  3. There is no such thing as a Moderate Republican
  4. A Slight Definition
  5. The definition of Conservative?
This entry was posted in To Be Categorized. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
  • bhurt-aw

    You still don’t see the con. Let’s use, as our jumping off point, the contention that church-based welfare is better (more economically efficient) than goverment-based welfare. Let’s ignore, for the moment, the seperation of church and state concerns as well (although anyone who is actually religious needs to understand that the seperation of church and state is as much to keep the state out of the church as it is to keep the church out of the state- or do you want non-beleivers telling you how to worship, who can be a priest, who can be married in the eyes of your church, etc? If your church is determining how my money is spent, then I get some say in how your church is run- no taxation without representation.).

    The problem here is that the church-run organizations are held to a different standard than the goverment run institutions. You are, literally, comparing apples to oranges here. Pretty much since their inception, the social welfare programs have been being attacked by the Republicans as inefficient and wastefull. Specifically, there are constant charges that people who don’t really belong on these programs are getting onto them anyways- Reagan’s “Welfare Queens” speech is the epitome of this. As such, large amounts of money have to be spent to insure that the money actually being spent isn’t being given to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Meanwhile, the church-run organizations are not subject to same scrutiny and controls. So hell yes, the church-run programs are more efficient- they don’t have to deal with the enforced inefficiency that the goverment run programs do.

    And notice who is doing the vast majority of calling goverment inefficient. Recently, several Vichyist Democrats have joined in, but historically it’s been Republicans. That it’s been primarily the Republicans who have been making goverment more inefficient. And benefitting from this inefficiency- because they’re the party of small, efficient goverment, and they promise to shrink goverment and make it more efficient.

    So this is the trend- Republicans in power begets goverment inefficiency which empowers Republicans more. With the inefficiencies of goverment, naturally, blamed on the Democrats. You see this in Peggy Noonan’s own article- she describes Bush’s spending as “liberal”.

    While this may be linguistically correct (Bush certainly is “free” with his spending), it is certainly not correct that Liberals love all goverment spending. This is another part of the Republican/Conservative Con. Think about it for a minute- the stereotypical Liberal. Drinks lattes. Lives in a big city. Drives a volvo. Works in an office. Middle class to upper middle class. Taxpayer. Why the hell would this person want to pay all of his money in taxes to support other people?

    In Republican fantasy land, there are only two positions- the communist position, wherein you pay 100% of your salary to the goverment, and the goverment then doles out to you what the goverment thinks you need, and the libertarian position, wherein you want to pay absolutely nothing to the goverment and get nothing in return. In logic this is known as the fallacy of the excluded middle. And when stated boldly like that, it’s obviously false- which is why Republicans rarely if ever state it flat out, they simply beg the question and use it as an unstated assumption. Peggy Noonan is using it (implicitly) when she calls Bush’s spending liberal.

    The reality is that there is a hell of a lot of spending liberals oppose. We beleive that there are some things the goverment should be spending money on- and we’re willing to give up some lattes and drive a somewhat cheaper volvo in order to pay the taxes to support that spending. And some of that spending doesn’t directly help us- spending like educating other people’s children, providing some sort of social safety net, etc. On the other hand, I don’t know of a single liberal who supported the handing out of no-bid contracts to Halliburton, and damned few (if any) who supported the war in Iraq. Yes, we value human lives more than money, and thus tend to cry a lot more over the human cost- but we ain’t too happy about the economic and political costs either.

    Another point to make here is that “Compassionate Conservatism” as it was actually implemented isn’t an isolated event. The no-bid Halliburton contracts, the bridge to nowhere, the defense spending build up- connect these dots. The real debate here isn’t over wether the money is going to be spent- it’s who the money is going to be given to.

    It’s not that we don’t understand “Compassionate Conservatism”- we do. We just don’t agree with it. Historical evidence strongly suggests that it’s the fiscal conservatives who don’t really understand it.

  • bhurt-aw

    Extending my comments above, I’d like to point out this dKos article. The point I was trying to make above was that those advocating reducing goverment spending need to be subjected to exactly the same skepticism that those advocating increasing goverment spending are subjected to. Because there is such a thing as being penny wise and pound foolish.

    And yet, to the “conservative” ideologues, all goverment spending is evil (well, except for goverment spending on them, that’s ok- greed wins out over ideology).

    Of course, sooner or later, the chickens come home to roost. At which point you have either a societial diaster, massive increases in needed goverment spending, or both. With Republicans in charge, we generally get both. We’re paying the billions of dollars it’ll cost to clean up the gulf coast, but they aren’t getting the help they need and we still have a diaster on our hands.

    And it’s not just Bush. You can’t lay the blame just on Bush. Everything that is “bad” about Bush has clear pre-cursors with previous Republicans. Dislike Bush’s budget? It’s not that much worse than Bush Sr.’s, or Reagan’s. Don’t like Bush’s stand on the Consitution and Presidential power? That’s pure Nixon. Not that either Bush or Reagan had that much respect for the Constitution either (Iran-Contra, anyone). Bush’s foreign policy? Take a long hard look at Panama and Grenada. W’s stand on education? Ketchup is a vegitable. Bush’s war on the environment? Watt. Bush’s war on science in general? Proxmire. On and on.

    The only thing that is surprising here is that people are surprised. Anyone who has been paying attention the last fourty years knew exactly what was going to happen. How? By predicting that Bush was going to be a President in the mold of Nixon/Reagan/Bush Sr. Not a very risky prediction, given who his running mate and all of his advisers were.

    Here’s the thing: the Republicans are going to try this scam again. Why not? It’s always worked so far.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    Wow. You went far afield from my actual post.

    Note the assertion that Peggy Noonan (not I) made:

    It was clear by at least the 1990s that local programs run and staffed by the religious and their organizations had a higher rate of success than did programs that excluded religion. Under Mr. Bush, the feds would no longer funnel money exclusively into nonsectarian programs.

    Now, your answer is all about comparing government-run institutions to church-run institutions. Peggy wasn’t talking about church-run versus government-run: she was talking about religious social service organizations (Salvation Army) versus non-religious social service organizations (Red Cross). So your whole “apples to oranges” thing falls apart at that point.

    The government has (for the last 20+ so years) favored the latter over the former in terms of funding, even though the former are more effective. And there’s no reason for the government to prefer a non-religious social service organizations to a religious social service that performs the same function: in fact, the seperation of church and state implies to me that the government should be blind to the difference between the two, and only focus on the one that is more effective.

    The point I was trying to make above was that those advocating reducing goverment spending need to be subjected to exactly the same skepticism that those advocating increasing goverment spending are subjected to. Because there is such a thing as being penny wise and pound foolish.

    Except that there’s always plenty of policymakers willing to increase spending, and not nearly enough consideration about whether that spending was a good idea in retrospect. Once spending is done, it’s locked in, and it takes an act of God and Congress to refocus that spending, even when it is a demonstrable failure (e.g.: welfare). On the other hand, if you reduce spending, you’ll always have plenty of people who are more than happy to tell you how you should spend that money you just reduced. This is why I support small-government folks, even though I don’t really want the smallest of small governments: we’ve alreday got a bigger government and it’s got every intention of getting bigger. Everything I hear coming out of liberal circles is talking about adding whole new programs without consideration of what is being displaced — admittedly, that’s exactly what I hear out of the Republicans, too, just in different departments.

    And yet, to the “conservative” ideologues, all goverment spending is evil (well, except for goverment spending on them, that’s ok- greed wins out over ideology).

    Certainly you’ve got some libertarians going so far as saying that government spending is evil. However, that’s not my position, nor the position of most “fiscal conservatives”. The position of most fiscal conservatives is that spending is okay *when* we see ROI in terms of a better economy, and that spending which is either getting multiplied out of whack in terms of its original estimate (e.g.: Medicare drug benefit) or is producing subpar results (e.g.: welfare) needs to be dropped, reassessed, and reworked to be more effective.

    And, yes, if all government programs were as efficient as the liberals dream they would be, fiscal conservatives would be all kinds of excited to jump on board. On the other hand, there’s a well-deserved amount of cynnicism about the effectiveness of government programs, and (at least on my part) a strong understanding that once you commit federal spending, it’s a pain in the ass to make it go away.

    And none of this gets back to the original point of the post, which is that there isn’t some kind of Machiavellian plot going on throughout the conservative world to trick people into cutting federal support for programs.

  • bhurt-aw

    The government has (for the last 20+ so years) favored the latter over the former in terms of funding, even though the former are more effective. And there’s no reason for the government to prefer a non-religious social service organizations to a religious social service that performs the same function: in fact, the seperation of church and state implies to me that the government should be blind to the difference between the two, and only focus on the one that is more effective.

    No taxation without representation. Sound familiar? How about “give onto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s, and give onto God what is Gods”? If my tax dollars are being spent on something, then I damned well want a say in how they’re being spent. If your church wants to accept goverment spending, then it needs to accept goverment rules- which means Equal Employeement Opportunity applies to positions within the church. You have to hire gays, women, and non-beleivers to be ministers and church officials- just like businesses and goverments do. And you have to marry them. The Golden Rules of Arts and Sciences- he who has the gold, makes the rules. Accept goverment money into your religion, and you accept goverment into your religion.

    The people pushing for getting religion into goverment are pushing for a theocracy. They sell you on a vision of increased economic efficiency, but the real point of the exercise is goverment funding of some religions. Do you really think that if the First Church of Satan, or a Wiccan Coven, applied for some of this money, that they’d actually receive it? No- this is about funnelling money to christian, more specifically protestant, denominations.

    Same con, different approach. I want to cut this or that program. So I stand up and go “hey, this or that program is inefficient. It needs to be dropped, reassessed, and reworked to be dropped, reassessed, and reworked to be more effective.” Conservatives jump on board. The program gets dropped, with promises that tomorrow it’ll get reassessed and reworked, only tomorrow never comes. Take a long hard look at how the President cut school funding- it worked exactly this way. It’s like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. And it’s not like this was a surprise to many of us- Republicans have been wanting to cut school funding since forever.

    The con works because there is no skepticism applied to cutting funds. Spending money always had the most rigourous skepticism applied to it, but never not spending money. Congames thrive where there is no skepticism.

    I also notice that you sidestepped the question of why religous organizations are more efficient (a claim I’ve yet to see evidence for, btw) than non-religous organizations. Even the most casual perusal of history shows that religions screw up about as often as goverments do- there is nothing special about religions.

    Interesting link- a study on the ROI of a Governmental Health Tracking program. For every dollar spent, the goverment saves $1.44. Now, what are the odds that not spending this money will have any skepticism applied to it? The important point here is that it is possible to be penny wise and pound foolish- saving $300 million at a cost of only $450 million.

    And notice the level of skepticism being applied. It actually isn’t skepticism, it’s simple disbeleive- which is blind belief, but in the different direction. You yourself said:

    And, yes, if all government programs were as efficient as the liberals dream they would be, fiscal conservatives would be all kinds of excited to jump on board.

    The question shouldn’t be does a given program have a dream-like efficiency. The question should be does a given program have a sufficient efficiency to make it worthwhile to spend money on it. There is a difference between a healthy skepticism and simply looking for an excuse not to fund a program.

    Which is why the con exists. There are those people who do not have the best interest of the Republican in their hearts. They want to defund programs because some of the money is going to people they don’t like (black people, gay people, poor people, etc.), or simply because the money isn’t going to them. They want to replace our democracy with either theocracy or facism. To these people, classic small-goverment conservatives are “usefull idiots”. People gullible enough to be conned into supporting what they don’t actually support. How do I know this? Because these are the people the supposed “small goverment conservatives” keep electing.

    As for the conceit that liberals propose plans without fully looking at what they’re displacing (i.e. looking at the costs), this is yet another Republican lie. Guess what- liberals don’t like paying taxes any more than conservatives do. The difference is that we are aware that a flawed program is often better than no program at all. Take healthcare as an example. Currently Americans spend 2x or more per capita on health care than anyone else on the planet, and yet we’re getting shitty health care that doesn’t cover more than fourty million people at all, and most of those it does cover it covers incompletely. And yet, we’re told that we can’t implement a goverment-run single payer health care, because it might not be perfectly efficient. Screw that- it doesn’t need to be perfectly efficient, it just needs to be more efficient than what we have now, which ain’t that difficult.

    If anything, not juding the costs of proposals is more symptomatic of Republicans than liberals- consider Medicare part D, the Iraq war, Bush’s tax cuts, etc. The cost of cutting spending is very rarely looked at.

  • analog

    So here’s your basic problem, then… YOU BELIEVED THEM. YOU BELIEVED LIARS!!! I knew they were lying! I knew that “compassionate conservatism” was nothing more than a slick marketing slogan for a: taking taxpayer dollars away from programs that help the poor, which Republicans reflexively hate, and b: funneling taxpayer dollars to the GOP’s allies/base, the radical fundamentalist churches. They did exactly what they planned to do, and exactly what the reality-based community expected them to do.

    Tell me honestly… had you heard the term “compassionate conservativism” before Bush used it in the 2000 presidential campaign? And if not, why are you continuing to use a propaganda slogan as if it meant anything other than, well, the opposite of what it implies? (There’s nothing either compassionate or conservative about it) You’re even inventing definitions for it – “Compassionate conservatism is the political application of the belief that people deserve to be empowered”. Did you get that phrasing from Bush or the GOP, or is it your own? You want to believe in it, because the marketing is so good. It’s no different than believing that if you smoke Camels, you’ll pick up better-looking girls.

    I note also that you quoted Peggy Noonan’s (totally undocumented – “it was clear” is her version of FOX’s “some people say”, i.e. bullshit) argument that churches are more efficient. Why is efficiency such an important goal? I, for one, am violently opposed to efficiency in government. If I wanted efficiency, I’d start by having one house of Congress, not two! That being said, I consider separation of church and state to be, well, sacred. I don’t want tax money going to churches, even if it’s more “efficient” than having the government do the job directly. There’s too much danger there, in both directions, and I’d think you should be familiar enough with the wannabe-theocrats of the GOP to realize just WHY I’m violently opposed.

    Next up, there’s a contradiction between empowerment and efficiency, one that flies in the face of the conservative conventional wisdom that work is always more efficient than welfare. Wringing the last few percent out of ANY system is generally not worth doing if efficiency is your goal. “Workfare” means paying for training, it means paying for childcare and elderly care, it means subsidizing employers – it actually costs more tax dollars than plain ol’ welfare, just giving people enough to not wind up homeless and starving. There’s a good deal of externalized cost involved (of course, externalized costs basically don’t exist in modern conservative economics, which is why they’re such nonsense in practice). The dirty little secret of the Clinton/GOP “welfare reform” of the late 1990s was that it was designed to make things as cheap as possible for the government, not to get people off the system. If your goal is to ultimately get people off welfare (and I support that goal), you’re going to wind up paying more tax dollars to do it than you would to just leave them in the unempowered, dependent state that conservatives supposedly deplore.

    So here’s my advice… first, never use the term “compassionate conservatism” again, because it’s a propaganda term aimed directly at you and you should never consciously use the enemy’s propaganda. Second, stop conflating efficiency and empowerment. If you want to minimize spending, just pay the poor to not riot in the streets. If you want to empower them so they’re independent, then honestly acknowledge it’s more expensive than simply paying them to not work. And third, take a long, hard look at the James Dobsons and Jerry Falwells before letting a single dollar cross that bright line between church and state.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    Glad to see you show up, analog — and with both guns blazing. :D

    First, I’d like to throw you here for a warm-up, here for evidence that faith-based initiatives are more diverse than their secular counterparts, and even at the ra-ra-ing for faith-based NGOs here.

    The only study I can recall says that faith based initiatives are less successful are in job training/placement studies. In which case I would naturally support the non-faith-based organizations over the faith-based ones, not because of the secular or religious status but on pure effectiveness.

    That should get you started, and I’ll come back to pick up some more.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    Wringing the last few percent out of ANY system is generally not worth doing if efficiency is your goal. “Workfare” means paying for training, it means paying for childcare and elderly care, it means subsidizing employers – it actually costs more tax dollars than plain ol’ welfare, just giving people enough to not wind up homeless and starving.

    Granted, although I think there’s better solutions for childcare than just throwing more money at the problem. But please note that when I’m talking about efficiency, I’m talking about both cost and effectiveness. Paying twice as much for three times as effective a program is worth it (given natural budget considerations) — the problem is, you can’t assume that just spending twice as much is going to make things three times more effective. If investing twice as much in a person gets them into being a productive member of society. I actually support workfare, because employing people to be helpless (as our current welfare system does) is a guaranteed way to destroy a person’s ability to contribute to society — quite frankly, I’d rather see us go back to the Great Depression-era fixes of employeeing people to shovel dirt, just to have another shift shovel it back.

    My major point, though, is and has been that it’s the current system that’s broken, and that we need to back up and take another swing. But all I’m hearing from politicians is to expand the already broken system.

    That being said, I consider separation of church and state to be, well, sacred. I don’t want tax money going to churches, even if it’s more “efficient” than having the government do the job directly.

    We’re talking about letting federal support go to faith-based organizations (organizations like the Salvation Army and black/Jewish community centers) just as easilly as secular organizations. Right now, everything is geared in favor of secular organzations, and there’s no reason for that. It doesn’t matter what faith the organization is, it’s not like we’re giving preference to faith organizations, we’re just stopping the discrimination against faith organizations which has got simply no justification.

    Tell me honestly…had you heard the term “compassionate conservativism” before Bush used it in the 2000 presidential campaign?

    Actually, yes, but I knew about Marvin Olasky before I knew about George W. Bush. The term, like “fiscal conservativism”, is grossly abused, but (like fiscal conservativism) it’s an important but underappreciated idea.

  • TheHawk

    Here’s a radical idea that will never happen. Stop giving them money to the government to distribute and let individuals donate it the causes and organizations they think are most effective. Instead of asking the government to be objective and non-partisan while still being frugal, let the people decide what they want to do with their money.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    The problem with your idea, TheHawk, as nice as it may be, is that people are generally sucky about caring for their fellow person. Some mandatory compassion is therefore in order. :D

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    Take healthcare as an example. … Screw that- it doesn’t need to be perfectly efficient, it just needs to be more efficient than what we have now, which ain’t that difficult.

    We’ve addressed this before — pretty much to death. The problem is that I’m yet to be impressed by a socialist health care system. In both England and Canada, the system collapsed because service was crap. On the other hand, state-level universal health care systems (which is wildly different than single-payer or socialist health care systems) seem to work out reasonably well, and leverage the existing health care infrastructure.

    BTW, the ultimate proof of the bad quality of English and Canadian health care is the demand for re-introduction of choice-based health care. People demanded that the choice-based health care be re-instated, at least partially, because of the poor quality of the socialized health care. Health care waiting periods were a top issue in the Canadian national elections as the system started to collapse — the very real cost problem of emergency-room-first treatment was not just an occassional annoyance (as it is in our system), but effectively a national systematic MO.

  • TheHawk

    I would argue that part of the reason that people are so sucky about caring for their fellow person is they have an assumption that someone else will take care of it. An assumption which is reinforced by increasing government programs.

    And I’m not saying we should eliminate all government charitable programs. Just that we should seriously challenge the assumption that its the governments responsibility to take care of everything.

  • analog

    The number one with a bullet efficiency problem of virtually ALL government aid for the poor is the intensive effort made to make sure nobody “cheats”, i.e. gets something they don’t absolutely desparately need. In some cases, the majority of funds are actually spent on the bureaucracy required to keep people from getting aid. The programs would universally cost less to operate if we were less strict and more generous.

    This weekend, I’m going to go buy groceries for some very poor friends. Why? They lost their food stamps due to a red tape issue. And it’s not that the state employees don’t WANT to help, but rather that they CAN’T help. They can’t make exceptions even when it means children go hungry.

    The church-based organizations you tout are efficient because they’re GENEROUS. They aren’t running extensive background checks or tightly monitoring just how bad that poor family needs to eat this week. Someone asks for help, they give help. And this is where the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the “compassionate conservative” approach to helping the poor comes out. For all the talk of “empowerment”, the conservative approach refuses to acknowledge the SHAME people feel in asking for help. Welfare is humiliating, and nobody wants to be on it. The only people taking aid without shame are the ones whose spirits have been totally broken by poverty and humiliation (the product of years of being called lazy and selfish for merely wanting to eat and sleep somewhere other than under a bridge).

    An economic model that elevates the idea that people are selfish greedy bastards to the point of theology leads to a belief that people will simply steal resources from the public without shame or remorse. For all the moralizing on the right, they sure think people are amoral! This leads to a system that, in practice if not in theory, We The People would rather spend a dollar to make sure those who aren’t destitute get any resources intended for the destitute than give that extra dollar to the destitute.

    Churches, with their passing understanding of the teachings of Jesus outweighing the politican’s tough-talk evocation of Reagan’s false “welfare queen” symbolism, simply give to those in need, and understand that those who don’t need generally don’t ask. That’s the “efficiency”. Government could be so efficient as well, if it weren’t for the selfish, greedy obsession with the selfishness and greed of others.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    The government could be plenty efficient “if this…” or “if that…”.

    Given “if this…” or “if that…”, the whole problem of welfare would be trivial because there would be no poor.

    Here in reality, faith-based organizations are better at doing charitable work than secular ones. So why have we been traditionally penalizing them? Is it truly a seperation of church and state — a non-judgemental stance — to penalize an organization (particularly an effective and valuable organization) simply because it is open about its faith-based status? It’s certainly just as discriminatory as preventing gay or minority advancement organizations from existing.

    Besides: would it be better to force faith-based organizations and people to go into hiding, or to try to pretend that they’re something different (like “Second Harvest” does)? The enshrinement of secularism is as damaging to this country as Americanity, and it is just as bigotted and biased while cunningly and ironically labelling itself “open” and “accepting”.

    As a bit of an aside, I tend to attribute the success of faith-based organizations to the following: 1) they are better at gathering and retaining volunteers than secular orgs; 2) they are less corrupt due to externalized policing; 3) they tend to be people-focused instead of system-focused (your point, analog).

  • bhurt-aw

    There is an externalized cost to the goverment funding churches. If you think that Wiccan organizations, or the First Church of Satan, or the Muslims, will be given grants on an equal basis to the Methodists or Baptists, you really are naive. If you think Pat Robertson or James Dobson would say to themselves “well, that’s part and parcel to faith based initiatives”, you’re living in a dream world. So now we have the goverment passing judgement on which religions are sufficiently acceptable to receive funding. And to be brutally honest, I’m not sure the Catholic Church would qualify.

    And where do we draw the line? If you donate money to your church to provide people food, all well and good. If they include gospel readings with their orange juice, that’s you’re problem (if you even have a problem with it). But if it’s the goverment’s dime, can they preach the word of God while doing God’s work? That’s why they’re there, after all- to do God’s work. So now we have the goverment paying people to promote their religion- not all religions, just some acceptable religions- oh, and to hand out orange juice. And what happens when they’re out of orange juice- but just happen to have more than enough Jesus on hand?

    It’s called conflict of interest. When your paycheck is being signed by Uncle Sam, you’re not doing God’s work- you’re doing the People’s work. We the people, who, in order to form a more perfect union, did ordain and establish this goverment. When you pick up the gavel and put on a robe, when you take an elected seat, you serve the people. Not some of the people. Not just the beleivers and the righteous. All of the people.

    You can’t be for faith based initiaves and be against judges ruling based on the ten commandments and not the law. You can’t be for faith based initiatives and be against calling this a Christian country. You can’t be for faith based initiatives and not be for theocracy. Because faith based initiatives are funding churches. That’s the point. And our democracy, our freedom of religion, is the externalized cost.

  • TheHawk

    Thats exactly why the government shouldn’t be in the position of deciding what charitable orgs are deserving or not. As you said, less mainstream religious organizations are not likely to get equal grants. But instead of penalizing organizations for their religious stance, the government should step out of the game entirely and allow people to use their own personal discretion to decide which organizations they wish to support or not.

  • Categories