Our patriotic duty

My wife showed me a great video the other day. I think everyone should take the time to watch it. It is only about 30 min. long. I will discuss it below, but I've linked it here.

This was a BYU devotional, or a talk given in a similar setting. The title of the speech is "Why Giving Matters". The speaker is Arthur Brooks, the president of The American Enterprise Institute. He starts off by talking about several entrepreneurs that he's known and some in history who believed that they were rich because they were so good at giving money away.

As an economist, he set out to disprove that notion with numbers. What he found was the exact opposite.

He found that Americans gave to charity about 300 billion dollars in 2006. This is much more than other countries. Average Americans, for example give about 11 times more than the average Italian, and that is after correcting for income.

Utah is the most charitable state in the union, by almost double. I would imagine that the reason for this is because the heavily LDS population would pay a lot in tithing, which is considered charity.

After he finished his study, he found that for each dollar you give to charity, you get about $3.75 back.

Further, he found that as our nation becomes more generous, our nation prospers more, and grows better economically.

He found that if each American increased their charitable giving by 1%, the GDP in this country would go up by $39 billion.

He also mentioned how government can't substitute for private giving. According to his data, we'll get poorer, unhappier and unhealthier if we let the government tax us more in order to spread the wealth around.

Joe Biden said that paying taxes is a patriotic duty. But Joe's wrong. Taking our place as charitable givers is our patriotic duty. Teaching giving to those we know is our patriotic duty. Serving others by our own free will and choice is our patriotic duty. Our patriotic duty is not to give our hard earned money to a government that will effectively waste it on more government, only allowing pennies of every dollar to reach the intended target.

That is one of the fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives generally feel that government should keep hands off hard earned money, and people will give of their own free will to others. Most liberals believe that the government should forcibly take money from those who earn it and give it to those who don't as a matter of fairness.

The data backs this up somewhat. Conservatives, even though they earn slightly less, give about 30% more to charity. This shows that conservatives really believe in using charities as a way of helping people instead of using the government.

So that begs the question: Do liberals believe in happily paying their taxes? Not if you look at Obama administration apointees. In fact, it could be said, after looking at who Obama has running the government now, that liberals only believe in paying taxes to help others if it's somebody else paying the taxes.

So give to charity and serve others, it's your patriotic duty.