No, acts of charity are pretty much an unqualified good – certainly, committed charity workers aren’t just in it for the ego boost. But I think they’d be first to agree that it would be better if their efforts had secure funding, or better yet, weren’t needed in the first place.
The cynical ploy of the right is to take our common desire to help, and neutralise it politically it by binding it up with some of our less attractive common instincts. It tells us that instead of welfare – a basic, morally neutral utility which goes to whoever needs it – we should think in terms of “charity”, which implicitly requires us to first sort ourselves into Citizens and Wretches. Once you buy that line, it’s easy to persuade you to think like a Dickensian miser.
