Why say "charity" instead of "entitlement" or "safety net"

"Charity" links the act to the motivation - love, care.  "Safety Net" is the language of political hacks.  So called charities have now begun to refer to people that they help as "clients". 
Language is the substrate on which we communicate and construct ideas.
To recast charity as a business client relationship is to deliberately remove any sense of gratitude to the people paying for the charity and replace it with the sense of entitlement that a purchaser of services would have.

The law provides no moral compass and is a set of arbitrary rules riddled with inconsistencies. 

Wealth is accumulated by the quaint principle of property rights which have generally been a shared value as well as a commonly violated value in most societies since.  A recently defunct social experiment attempted to regard property as theft and the leaders in its major remaining adherent, China, seem to have been very personally successful at property theft.... perhaps not quite as large as Gina.  But who would know ?

The argument that "entitlements, wealth and power are all creations of law" seems to be a variant on Obama's well known "you didn't build that"  line.  You don't own that.  Any thing you have is the gift of the law.

I look at it the other way. The law is the record of the messy battleground fought by a range of cultural groups attempting to exert power over other cultural groups.  You only have what you have fought for and won. 

If the left had unfettered power, Gina's wealth would no doubt be expropriated without compensation to pay for Craig Thomson's legal defence, and any mention of it would be prohibited by Stephen Conroy's thought police.

Luckily, we still have some checks and balances in Australia and there is both a vestige of support for property rights and for freedom of speech, so the left must chip away at them slowly. 

The key point is that rights are only as good as your ability to defend them.  Control the the language and a right can be redefined as a wrong - and a charitable gift can be redefined as the entitlement of a client.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment or Send a Message

You can use this form to send a message OR make a comment as your contribution is NOT published automatically, but sent to Stephen for
consideration.


You can select "anonymous" from the drop down menu below if you do not have a google account.