Liberal Giving

I missed the show when it was on in December but John Stossel did a piece on who gives. As I was doing my daily Hitler Youth news search, I ran across an article Stossel wrote in anticipation of the show.

Stossel does a test of giving between the liberal affluent hotbed of San Francisco and a middle class conservative enclave of Sioux Falls SD. You can read the article. Stossel backs up a lot of his article with data collected by Arthur Brooks in his book "Who Really Cares".

The common stereotype of conservatives is that they have theirs so why share. But I believe conservatives understand what it means to be about something bigger than your own consumption, that life is about what you give... not what you take.

As a recovering liberal, I can attest to being someone who was more about their own consumption than contributing. I even believed it was selfish for people to want to have children. I could never understand the whole concept of living into something bigger than yourself.

Looking back at my own liberal thought process and talking to other liberals, time after time, I notice classic projection. Why not? As a liberal, I obviously know more than you, so if I think something is selfish or self serving than it most be so.

A few years back, I had a liberal client who just started bashing Bush and how he was killing the environment. After he ended his diatribe, I asked him if he wanted to contribute money from his Ohio tax refund to the Ohio Wildlife Conservation fund or the Nature Preserves and scenic rivers (both elections on your state income tax form if you would like to do) since it was clear to me the enviroment was important to him. The answer was a definite no. He's also no longer a client, figure that.

So I guess for a liberal, generosity can only exist when the government takes one's wealth to do for another.

It reminds me of a great Reagan quote "Liberals know much more than the rest of us, but what they know just isn't so".