Government Welfare and the Common Good
I stumbled across the following statement on Facebook the other day: "Conservatives want to help poor & needy by taking responsibility & freely choosing to help. Progressives want to help by abrogating responsibility to Govt & letting them take money & redistribute it." No doubt this is intended as a generalisation: clearly some progressives engage in charitable giving, and some conservatives do not. But the premise itself intrigued me. Is private aid more effective than government welfare? This question is always relevant for democratic citizens. We regularly elect representatives who sit somewhere on a continuum in the role of government in supporting the poor. I thought I'd crunch some numbers around what it would take for private charity to replace the role of government welfare. Let's look at current charitable giving for starters: "An estimated 14.9 million Australian adults (80.8%) gave in total $12.5 billion to charities and