Conservatives have a reputation for discounting the suffering of the needy and for legislating morality. But a swim just under the surface of that accusation reveals that the current is actually moving the other direction. Two strokes should make the point.
Stroke one: a fundamental of conservatism is confidence in the nature of free market economics. After all, anything other than free market force on an economy is actually an unjust intrusion on a system which presumes equality of opportunity for every actor, a basic value for conservatives. The critic asks, how does a free market feed the poor? The direct (but not complete) answer is that it simply doesn’t. The response to which is that the market, therefore, is morally insufficient, if not entirely vacuous, lacking compassionate intervention. (It is peripheral to this argument that hunger and poverty actually motivate productivity and that productivity benefits everyone in the system, including the poor.)
But nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, there is absolutely no reduction of the personal responsibility for benevolence in a free market economy. It is the presumption that benevolence must be the result of an artificial regulation on the market which conservatives reject, not benevolence itself.
And there’s the second stroke: making benevolence the concern of government instead of the concern of charitable organizations and morally responsible individuals is a terrible idea. What motivates it (the terrible idea) is the fear that people will fall through the cracks, and that even those who don’t fall through the cracks completely might be in significant misery before someone notices and gives them help. It’s a legitimate fear.
But in the free market, it is that suffering which motivates those who can to work out of their poverty toward a better future. And it is the aversion to the suffering of others and the fear that they will fall through the cracks which motivates individuals and local organizations to step in and help those in need who cannot work toward that better future. But it is necessarily organically motivated, not bureaucratically. To remove the risk and pain from the system removes the only thing that allows genuine altruism rather than artificial optimism to move the whole system. In other words, if it is moral to meet the needs (not just desires) of the needy, then it is the height of legislating morality to force everyone to meet the need through taxation, rather than to allow those who actually care to do something about it personally.
There are all kinds of practical reasons why it is better for the response to be motivated spiritually and engaged locally (which would also be a feature of the free market), but they are not the point here.
The gist of the issue is that a bureaucracy can enforce mandatory pain-amelioration to salve the public conscience and cover over the need, but it cannot tolerate a constant awareness of real needs and it cannot produce the legitimately helpful response to those needs which personal engagement brings. No. Only morally motivated agents acting either individually or freely in local organizations can do so. It is risky, messy, and in some ways painful (for everyone involved). But it is also both actually moral and actually compassionate. And it is, after all, always better to swim with the current than against it.
(Afterthought: By the way, the notion of compassionate conservatism meaning that conservatives ought to promote welfare-type issues along with conservative values is fundamentally flawed. Real conservatism condemns the legislated redistribution of wealth and promotes real compassion in the same stroke.)
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