Charity Is A Tax On Generosity

This has occurred to me as I've been asked several times by people on the streets of New Haven for money. If I have the right configuration of bills in my wallet to do so, I typically give a dollar or two, because I really am on board with Matt Yglesias' "just give money to poor people" program. But it strikes me that there's a big problem with relying on private charity, either on the individual level such as my recent encounters or through larger-scale organizations, as a mechanism for giving money to poor people, as opposed to having the government do it by taxing and spending, beyond just the simple fact that more transferring of wealth will happen in a public system. Compared to a public social safety net, a system of private charity that transferred the exact same amount of money to poor people would have a significant distributional impact on the class of people away from whom money was being redistributed. Specifically, in the private-charity world, the more generous you are the less well-off you'd be, financially speaking at least. Now, you'd be less well-off because you would have voluntarily given away some of your money, and maybe like Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of the play you'd discover some sort of spiritual benefit to all this giving. But the fact remains that your colleague with the same salary but more the attitude of early-play Scrooge will end up with a bigger bank account than you will. In effect, therefore, reliance on private charity as a remedy to the problems of poverty amounts to a tax on generosity, and an incentive toward selfishness. Generosity is typically considered a good thing, and while I think the world recognizes that the most virtuous people won't be the ones who do the best for themselves in terms of material standard of living, that doesn't mean it's a good thing to set up a system that actively discriminates against possessors of a certain kind of virtue. Adopting public policies that use progressive income taxes to fund aggressive anti-poverty and anti-homelessness efforts would not only help poor people (which is, of course, by far the primary reason to do them), they would also remove from those of us with an inclination toward generosity, perhaps even what some might consider excessive generosity, the burden of addressing those problems on a penny-ante private basis.

Of course, under the Republican doctrine that all poor people are bums and moochers who, having been judged worthless by The Market, deserve their fate of destitution, the generosity I'm describing as a virtue being unfairly taxed by inadequate anti-poverty policies is really the whole problem, the thing on which these evil "takers" prey, so this argument probably isn't really going to get very far, is it?