Private charity can’t cover everyone’s needs, so don’t we need government?
Question 100 in Faith Seeking Freedom: Updated & Expanded
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Most people compare what the government spends on welfare for the poor to the private charity dollars spent on the poor, arriving at the conclusion that private charity organizations could not bear the burden of providing for the poor if the welfare state were simply removed. However, this comparison is unfair for two reasons. First, it does not account for the fact that private charity organizations, on average, have far less bureaucratic overhead than government-run ones. Money spent through private charities is often more effective than government-run welfare programs.
Second, and more importantly, it ignores a third but very prominent anti-poverty measure that doesn’t require government at all: free market capitalism. People achieved prosperity in the past 200 years not through welfare programs but through free markets. Oftentimes, governments have regulated the market in such a way that it creates the conditions for higher unemployment, increased prices for goods and services, and other factors that burden the poor.
Charity is only a short-term solution to the direct symptoms of poverty, not its causes. A robust society addresses the root problems to poverty by looking at a variety of issues.
Libertarian Christians believe that because work is essential to our life and our well-being, being recipients of the fruit of other people’s labor (whether private or public) can only go so far. What those in poverty want and need is the fruit of their own labor.