Urge Congress to End Hunger
If you read the two articles, listed here, one from Bread for the World and the other by Roger Pilon, a CATO Institute scholar, your head will spend and you will, most likely, spew great amounts of pea colored soup stuff. They represent two very difference world-views yet they each claim to be Christian.
The first organization is urging the United States Congress to end world hunger. Bread for the World provides no bread for the world. At least, not directly - that is, with real bread to real people. What they provide for the poor are letters. Not to the poor but to members of Congress. Here is how they state it for themselves.
People place these letters in the offering plates during church services, prayerfully offering them to God before sending them to Congress.
Do we urge the government to provide funds to feed people around the world or do we take that moral responsibility away from the government and put it back into the hands of people of faith and/or humanitarian principles? This might be called Privatized Compassion.
David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, does say that ending poverty by putting more money back into the hands of persons who will spend it or invest it is a worthy goal. By creating jobs you establish an income for a formerly poor family. Contrary to that, he then advocates taxing rich people and ending the middle class tax cut incentives - like ending the tax deduction on the interest paid toward a mortgage loan. This too, he believes, will end poverty. But taking money away from those in a position to create jobs is contrary to his first aim. I'm confused.
The second organization is saying, because of the high burden and low efficiency of government programs, every time the United State Congress creates a new social program they take away a measure of the freedom enjoyed by its citizens. If our government would only leave its citizens alone, many of them would by their own volition step up to form more and various relief organizations to help address world hunger and all other forms of deprivation. I am not so sure that assumption would hold true in practice.
Is it immoral for a government to take honestly earned wealth from one group of citizens and, against their will, give it to another group of citizens? One group is considered the unworthy rich and the other the worthy poor. On what basis is "worthiness" determined? Is it a preference for the poor found in the Prophetic writings of the Old and New Testaments? Did that principle advocate robbery of the rich or voluntary gifts?
The Presbyterian Church (USA) invests its mission dollars in Bread for the World. The total mission budget for 2011 is nearly 88 million dollars. We are heavily invested in "advocacy" for the poor. On the income side, we are over budget for 2010; so, with the surplus we hired two more staff persons, one is "an additional position at the Presbyterian United Nations Office in New York and new and expanded programs at the Office of Public Witness in Washington, DC, the Presbyterian Hunger Program and Self-Development of People ― all programs of Compassion, Peace and Justice;"
Public Witness is a nice term of art for "lobbying Congress." The other word is "advocacy" which takes in more than just changing legislation. There is little doubt we have invested heavily in the belief that tax payer funded programs will help reduce poverty here and around the world. I'm not sure they are correct. The money spent on "public witness" and "advocacy" could feed a lot of hungry people.
I think I land somewhere in between each of these extremes. I am not a Libertarian but neither to hold much confidence in poverty ending through direct gifts of food and certainly not in lobbying Congress. It seems to me that a stable government with a democratic philosophy that puts people (demos) first over military power and just plain corruption would go a long way toward reducing poverty overseas. In the US we need to bring more and more dysfunctional families to Jesus Christ. Being Born Again can do wonders to the work ethic and can end personal patterns of self destruction.
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