People wrapped up in themselves make very small parcels. Empty hearts have room for nothing while full hearts always have room for more.
From A. C. Grayling “The Choice of Hercules: pleasure, duty and the good life in the 21st Century”
Are those who think mainly about money who preoccupied with tax by definition the prime exemplars of the empty hearted?
In today’s Washington Post there is an article by George Will claiming that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives. Liberals, he says, regard charitable giving as retrograde , “a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes”. Democrats, he tells us, represent a majority of the wealthiest congressional districts, and half of America’s richest households live in states where both Senators are Democrats.
What he doesn’t of course do is to tell us how all this generosity by poor, over-taxed Republicans breaks down. Overwhelming charitable giving in the US goes to churches. Some churches do wonderful work (my own nephew’s church has recently raised $90,000 to help Iraqi refugees, but then his church is in the UK). But where giving simply goes to keep up bricks and mortar and church overheads (and I would add, salaries), this is not charitable giving as I define it. Help for the poor can be given without the intercession of a minister. If you take out the bricks and mortar maintenance tithes, non-church members, atheists, Epicureans etc.,probably give quite as much, or more, that conservatives, but give it to non-profits, to Ugandan orphans, through organizations like KIVA etc. Where I live a local and very liberal church is the very-well organized and efficient funnel for most of the most effective local charity. Conservatives are more concerned with introducing hand-guns. As usual, George Will presents half-truths and has the Washington Post at his beck and call to present them, without editing. And then you wonder why people no longer trust the mainstream media.