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We all like to think we
are good, caring people. Of course, we all want to be happy
ourselves, but I think most of us genuinely want others to be
happy, too. We want to help others rather than harm them. We
want to make the world a better, not a worse, place. But the
question we really need to ask ourselves as a society is, "Do we
care enough?" With U.S. President-elect Barack Obama set to
require (he
has since expunged this word) community service from
secondary and post-secondary students, clearly he feels we need
to care more.
In fact, though, the
evidence is mixed, for we do care quite a lot. We care enough to
help people who are suffering, often without requiring anything
of them in return. We are compassionate enough to take a small
fraction of our great wealth (say, one half?) to provide a
safety net for people in their times of need. We care enough to
save people from the consequences of their own foolish actions,
even if it means they (and others) will learn no lessons and be
even more foolish in the future.
Actually, "we" are so
compassionate that we often make other people's decisions for
them, saving them from being foolish in the first place. We are
"compassionate" enough to force our more reluctant fellows to
help each other, and moreover, to force them to help our
way, according to our plan, regardless of the fact that
our way and our plan have been shown to destroy
wealth and create misery time and time again. Yes, we are
generous enough of spirit to impose our plan through force of
law when we prove unable to convince everyone to adopt it
voluntarily.
Do we care enough to
provide education for every child (even if that education is
substandard and infected with thinly-veiled government
propaganda)? Yes, we do. Are we compassionate enough to make
sure every child attends school (even when teachers' unions
prevent focusing on quality and innovation as revenge for having
to educate the unwilling and disruptive)? Yes, we are. Can we
find it in our hearts to draft our fellow men and women into
paying for the educational system (even when they don't want to
use it because it values socialization more than learning and
doesn't teach kids how to think)? Yes, we can.
We, as a society, care so
much that we are willing to force taxpayers to foot the bill for
certain people to do work that is not required, and to do it
inefficiently, instead of letting them find useful work at a
price the market will bear. We, as a society, are so
compassionate that we guarantee some people a minimum wage, or a
rent-controlled apartment, even though it means others will not
find work and the supply of apartments will dry up.
We "care enough" to take
profits from successful businesses to give it to the less
successful as a reward for their failures. We are generous
enough to take from the less-entrenched to give to the firmly-established
and well-connected. We have the kindness of heart to support our
farmers, paying them not to grow food and taxing their
foreign competitors out of the market, even if this means we all
pay more for food and those foreign competitors starve or become
dependent on foreign aid or switch to cultivating poppies and
coca leaves.
Clearly, we are at least
concerned enough to siphon off the profits of those big, bad
pharmaceutical companies, even if it means hampering their
ability to innovate. But do we care enough to regulate and
litigate against them to such an extent that it is no longer
worth their while to produce vaccines in sufficient quantities?
Are we compassionate enough to tell them what they can charge
for the products of their efforts, even to the point where we
destroy their incentives to take on the risk of researching and
developing new drugs and the whole industry grinds to a halt?
Are we concerned enough to militate for a complete government
takeover of the industry, given that governments have such
stellar track records when it comes to choosing which new
technologies to invest in? Only time will tell.
Do we care enough about
the fate of every single species and subspecies of plant and
animal to exchange growth for habitat protection—and force
everyone else to make the same choice, regardless of how poor
they remain? Do we feel enough concern for our children and our
children's children to want them to live in a world containing
every subspecies of insect that exists today, even if it means
children somewhere else will die in childhood from diseases the
wealthy needn't worry about? This will be a real test of our
compassion in the 21st century.
Truly, we all like to
think we are good, caring people—which is why the rhetoric of
caring is so powerful. But "we don't care enough" is too often
merely a tool for clouding thought on important issues. People
are twisted into knots by the requirements of altruism, which
are never fulfilled. When you believe in your heart that you
belong to everyone but yourself, no amount of caring is ever
enough.
And the cold, hard fact
about caring is that if it is not accompanied by thinking, it
can easily do more harm than good. Anybody can have good
intentions, but good intentions lead just as surely to hell as
to heaven. The wealth we all want to spread around so
magnanimously must first be produced before it can be shared,
which makes of productiveness a more important virtue than
charity. It is long-term, enlightened self-interest, operating
within the context of a free market where property rights are
strictly enforced, that has lifted huge swaths of mankind up
from abject poverty, and that continues to do so insofar as it
is allowed to function. To be effective in promoting the
happiness and wellbeing of others, one must not merely profess
to want to help them; one must care enough to find out how they
might truly be helped.
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