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You're on the right path but you've assigned the responsibility to the wrong people. Individuals should act with compassion, not groups.

When a group attempts to act compassionately it leads to compulsory "charity," corruption, greed and the desire for power.

When an individual acts out of compassion it is laudable, good, and admirable. It leads to a sense of fulfillment, and helps others to understand the responsibility of their situations. It affords the individual the opportunity to actually help a person in need, rather than anonymously throw money at the situation via a third party, like the government. That is the definition of generosity.

If anyone has misinterpreted my words in such a way as to lead them to believe that I don't act charitably with my money, time and efforts in my personal life, then they are reading something into my words that doesn't exist there.

For many people, especially in the society we've created, it is very difficult to separate individual action from the action of the government on "behalf of the individual." If you cannot currently do this, then making the effort to see the difference is paramount if you're going to be able to read my words, and the words of other like-minded citizens of this country, without being offended or assuming that I'm heartless or uncaring. Nothing could be further from the truth and I could easily line up dozens of people to testify to that for you. Several of which are members of this community.

My efforts in threads like this one are simply to help people understand what I intuitively (or maybe as a product of my upbringing) understand. The simple fact that when charity isn't done personally it ceases to be charity. It becomes an onerous and resented task (like paying taxes). You lose all sense of responsibility for HOW your money is used for the benefit of others, and most of all you lose the sense of accomplishment and fulfillment that you gain when you personally help some one, not just to pay a bill or buy some food, but help them find a way to help themselves. It is the height of selfish conceit to assume that others are not capable of doing the things that you do to earn money. The money that affords you the opportunity to do for others what you would hope someone would do for you if you were in a bad situation. How can someone claim its charity to deprive someone of the same opportunities they have?

That is exactly what social justice programs do. They don't teach people how to improve their lives, they only teach people the lie that something can be had for nothing. That you're owed something simply for being born. If someone is taught that from birth, what incentive will they ever have to achieve something greater than they are? What will motivate them to want to be better? What if one of those ghetto kids would have cured cancer, but because he never had to work for anything in his life, he never wanted to try harder, never wanted to excel at something, never wanted to be the best, and instead of working hard, going to med school and curing cancer, he just married the girl he knocked up and spent the rest of his life collecting a check from "those greedy rich people." Who, by the way, did work hard, did want something better for themselves, and they got off their asses, and they went out and GOT IT!

This may seem to be a bit off topic but the social medicine programs that started this conversation are part of the same problem. You cannot address one independent of the other. Until we realize that the problems are systemic and pervasive through our entire social/governmental structure, we cannot act effectively to fix them.

Ultimately what it boils down to is that some of us think that if we were allowed to use our money (effort and time) as we see fit then it would have a much greater impact than the government's use of said money.

The other side of the argument believes (and I think this is perverted logic at best) that they are the epitome of charity in their advocacy for the government to take from one and give to another. What they seem to believe is that they are charitable but the rest of humanity is greedy and selfish and left to their own devises would never help anyone. If you really believe that everyone but you is selfish, why would you want to help them? And that, in my opinion, is the primary flaw in that line of reasoning. In order to want to help others you must first have a sincere belief in the redemptive quality of your fellow man. But since that sincere belief logically leads to my side of the argument, I'm forced to realize that many folks who are claiming to be charitable, by advocating for wealth redistribution, either have a nefarious reason for doing so, or only want to be SEEN as charitable and giving. The desire for perceived charity over actual charity, in my opinion is one of the definitions of evil.