AuSable River wrote:If you are concerned about downtrodden workers -- then open your own firm, compete against supposedly evil selfish owners who 'exploit' workers by giving them a paycheck via voluntary and peaceful exchange.
indeed, the greatest service anyone can provide is a sustainable job, when none were available previously by risking capital and foregoing instant gratification to build a viable business.
in sum, most people I have worked for were decent, practical, and hardworking folks who geniunely cared about they workers and paid them as much as was economically feasible to grow a company and make a sustainable profit.
in contrast, most of the Leftists I have met rarely gave to charity because they expected and lobbied for charity to be provided with other people's money against their will.
Indeed, evangelical christians are the most generous chartiable givers:
http://therooftopblog.wordpress.com/200 ... -abc-says/
Not only is such utopianism and voluntarism impossible, the act of giving charity is counterproductive and only serves to perpetuate social evils. The inimitable Oscar Wilde said it best:
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.
There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.