How Socialism Affects Charity; G. Pearson

One of the ways socialism (the use of government to solve social prob lems) adversely affects morality is in its destruction of the urge and ability to privately care for loved ones and neighbors. It can destroy this urge and ability by reducing the loftiness of soul which characterizes great people. That is, by relegating Mr. Pearson is recently retired after many years of writing and teaching at Brigham Young University and the Church Education System of Latter Day Saints. 440 all its efforts to the satisfaction of the belly instead of to the freeing of the mind and soul, the government can lead a people downward instead of upward-down into selfish grati fication of the body instead of up ward into selfless gratification of spiritual needs. A people which is blessed with many persons of lofty soul seem to obtain material prosperity as a sort of by-product of their pursuit of spir itual ends; whereas a people whose government has led them into a sys tem which attempts, by political manipulation, to gratify all their material needs succeeds in so com pletely crushing the qualities on which prosperity is sustained that poverty persists and grows. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this: Whatever elevates, enlarges, and ex pands the soul, renders it more capable of succeeding in those very undertakings which concern it not. Whatever, on the other hand, enervates or lowers it, weak ens it for all purposes, the chiefest as well as the least, and threatens to render it HOW SOCIALISM AFFECTS CHARITY 441 almost equally impotent for the one and for the other. Hence the soul must re main great and strong, though it were only to devote its strength and greatness from time to time to the service of the body. If men were ever to content them selves with material objects, it is proba ble that they would lose by degrees the art of producing them; and they would enjoy them in the end, like the brutes, without discernment and without im provement. (Democracy in America, Translated by Henry Reeve (New Ro chelle, New York: Arlington House) Vol ume Two, Second Book, p. 157) A specific example of how the gov ernment adversely affects spiritual qualities is in the difficulties it im poses on private charity through the IRS. Within certain limits a person may deduct donations to institu tions that have been approved as le gitimate charities; but the grim-faced bureaucrats who arbitrate deduc tions make it difficult for anyone who wants to help a destitute neighbor or relative. The regulations are many and difficult to surmount. The inev itable effects on souls are a devious ness that quenches honesty and a callousness that turns faces away from suffering. (After all, aren't the poor the responsibility of the gov ernment?) Those who run the IRS and the politicians who gave them their power seem to feel that they have a duty to siphon off most of our capability to practice private char ity and then set up rules that will discourage the "wasting" (as they seem to see it) of funds on the truly needy whose sholllders we rub daily.

I am personally and painfully ac quainted with a i man who has car ried a heavy farnily burden of this sort for years. l{e has a son who is marvelously gifted with musical tal ent. This son also was afflicted at age fifteen with an eye disease which was curable only by corneal trans plants. Special ¢ontact lenses were the prescribed treatment for, hope fully, the first fiffjeento twenty years. Then the only a~ternative to a life time of blindness was corneal trans plants. Only the 'transplants became necessary much earlier than ex pected. The boy was in college, mar ried and supporting himself. Then several years o~ economic and per sonal disaster ensued. It is not my phrpose to relate the bitter details, buit only to recite some of the governmetlt policies involved. Suffice it to say' that the father put out over $50,00Q in doctor bills, hos pital bills and fafmily support during the times his son was incapacitated.

Following is a partial list of adver sities he encoum.tered that directly or indirectly invblve government in terference in social and economic matters that sh~uld be none of gov ernment's business: 1. He got most of the money for his son by selling stock in a public company. (Of cQurse, he had to sell more than $50,000 worth of stock because of the tax bite.) Due to var442 THE FREEMAN July ious acti vities of the Securities and Exchange Commission, this stock was in a slump when he sold it. So he got one-tenth as much as he could have a few months after he sold it. (He also could have done much bet ter earlier than the time he sold it. The point is that the roller-coaster the stock had been on was caused, in this case, by SEC activities. The market activities had nothing to do with the value of the stock company. That didn't change. The honesty or dishonesty of the management didn't change. But the promotion of the company's stock by stock brokers changed as their perception of the SEC's approval changed.) 2. The son checked out all of the government agencies that were sup posed to help in his type of personal and economic tragedy. He found that none would help him unless he lied to them in some way. Maybe others lie. But he places a high price on integrity. The father, on principle, did not seriously consider govern ment help.

3. Due to IRS rules about capital gains taxes, the father had to pay capital gains on the entire proceeds from his stock sales. He did have a legal base in the stock; but it was his accountant's considered opinion that his records were not structured to prove it if a challenge ensued. So he reported the full proceeds with out any deductions and paid the ap plicable tax. 4. During most of the years of his son's trials, the father could not claim the level of deductions he could have claimed ifhis son could have contin ued his college education. Once the schooling stopped, the only deduc tion the father could claim was the dependent exemptions for his son's wife and children, which was only a fraction of what they were costing him. 5. Except for that short period when his son was in school, the fa ther could not claim any deductions for the huge hospital and doctor bills. This was because he could not claim his son as a dependent. His son had to file a separate tax return and his earnings were too low to take full advantage of the medical expenses.

6. The son never qualified for un employment compensation at any time because his eye problem made him unavailable for employment. At the times he could see well enough to work, he earned too much through piano tunings and other employ ment that he picked up himself. 7. The father retired during all this. The stock money had run out; but he had various other sources of income. However, they all counted against the amount he could earn without having his social security check diminished. The result was that those benevolent bureaucrats that sit over retirement regulations have deducted sums from his social security checks and are about to dip 1982 HOW SOCIALISM AFFECTS CHARITY 443 even deeper. They got him coming and going because the money for which they are deducting penalties was money he spent on his son and his son's family. So, even though he did not have that extra income to Iive on himself, Social Security treated it that way.

But don't waste any tears on this man. He does not believe in public charity anyway. He will find a way to go on supporting himself honestly and legally. The foregoing partial listing of how government agencies and policies adversely affected one man's life was meant to show how socialism tends to worsen social conditions by de stroying self-reliance and the prop erty base people must be able to cre ate if they are to be self-reliant. The majority of American people have been taught by a humanistic state supported and state-sponsored pub lic religion (in the guise of democ racy) that no end of economic bene fits deserve the title of civil rights. They overlook the fact that all of these pseudo civil rights require the redistribution of private property by a system of public robbery. This public robbery is a form of violence as real as that employed by those wicked persons who break into our homes increasingly these days and it is far more extensive both in quantity of goods stolen and psycho logical effect. Violence begets violence, no matter what name you give it. Thus government sponsors the deterioration of moral values in hu man souls. That, in turn, kills the human qualities and aspirations on which all forms of wealth, spiritual or temporal, are based.

If politicians and bureaucrats of a socialist bent were to get hold of this kind of problem and see that there is an illness th~t needs curing (a very unlikely probability), the medicine they would prescribe would be new tax regulations designed to give re lief to honestJy charitable people. (Imagine the confusion that would bring into our 'tax laws.) But that is not the cure. The cure is a stronger medicine: the withdrawal of past medicines and drugs that have put America into a spiritual coma. Eventually we must get back to where moral v~lues are more prized than the full ;belly and the warm back. When we do-and I, for one, am convinced that we will-the full bellies and the, warm backs will be a blessed by-product, not the main thrust of life. How can the government encour age the development of loftiness of spirit? Not so much by what it does, unless it be the restoration of the feeling that justice can be expected.

It mostly can exalt the souls of men by what it does not do. We must go back to the limited government originally provided by the Consti tu tion. ® A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Locking Up the Range THE "lower forty-eight" states of the United States have always been two countries. One is the country of trees and abundant rainfall, reaching from the Atlantic coast to just beyond the tier of states that stretches from Minnesota to Louisiana on the west ern bank ofthe Mississippi. The other country, beginning with the Great Plains and continuing westward through mountain territory that collects some irrigation water, is predominantly dry. The different characteristics have invited a con fusion of counsel about title to lands, culminating in something that westerners know today as the Sage brush Rebellion. Gary D. Libecap, who teaches eco· nomics at Texas A&M University, has explored the implications of the Sagebrush Rebellion in a fascinat ing, though somewhat disjoint 0 d, book, Locking Up the Range: Fed eral Land Controls and Grazing, 444 which is published by the Pacific In stitute for Public Policy Research of San Francisco and marketed through the Ballinger Publishing Company of Cambridge, Mass., a Harper and Row subsidiary (109 pp.; $17.50 cloth, $8.95 paper). Briefly, Mr. Libecap's message is that public-which means bureaucratic - management of grasslands, far from controlling the waste that comes with overgrazing, is bound to increase it. It is just one more example of the old truism that when "everybody" is responsible for something, nobody really minds the store. No wonder that states such as Nevada, Utah and New Mexico, where the federal government is the big land owner, have tended to sup port Ronald Reagan's Secretary ofthe Interior James Watt in his conten tion, unusual for a government ser vant, that people on the spot might be better able to care for local re sources than bureaucrats trying to LOCKING UP THE RANGE 445 extend their paper empires some thousands of miles away.