Average Americans could help countless people in the third world. Here's the idea. We setup an account that would act as an endowment. It would only use half the interest to feed people. It would reinvest the other half. Normal people could fund this. There are over 100 million wage earners in this country. If each person setup an automated debit into this account for 1 dollar per month, America would add 1.2 billion dollars to this account per year.
Two percent of this total is 24 million dollars. This would be the amount of money available in only the first year. In ten years, there would be more than 240 million dollars available.
We would have to setup a way for them to access this money with little or no overhead. We could use the UN or churches or governments. With this much money it would be difficult to avoid corruption. This endowment would grow forever and in time would be the greatest source of charity in the world. Eventually we could feed everyone that needed food.
A dollar a day could adequately feed a person in most third world countries. I know this is would not teach the people how to fish. The truth is, this country has the moral obligation to help those who have been denied the means to help themselves. If we have to feed them forever, then so be it, we have the means.
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Sure we might have the obligation, those who do not want are morally obligated to assist those who do, but the kicker is choice, agency, freedom. Do we choose to help, or are we forced to? I say be wary of anything that takes away our agency.
My kids teach me so much about human nature. If I tell my oldest to go forcibly do something, she immediately recoils and attempts to do the opposite. But if I give her the choice, with the proper motivation, she will do it just about every time.
It's like that parable of the sun and the wind, seeing who could remove the man's coat. The wind, as hard as it could blow, could only make the man pull his coat tighter around him. The sun only needs to shine his warmth and the man willingly removes it.
Yeah Ammon I think you are right. Whatever form of relief we give to people, it has to be voluntary. I think we need to get the people of this country to wake up to the world around them.
How many people have dreams of a big house, a boat and a cabin in the mountains? I don't think that is why God gave us all this wealth. He gave it to us so we could help the rest of the world, or even those in our own neighborhoods. The reason I focus on the third world is because people in developed countries that are poor are only poor because they are lazy. People in Africa or India are poor because there are no opportunities. I think God expects us to figure out ways to help them with our wealth.
You know I just ran across a website that referred to plastic grocery bags and how horrible they are for the environment. It was saying how San Francisco might be banning them very soon and how wonderful that was. Yeah it probably is wonderful for the world to cut the consumption of plastic grocery bags, but an official ban from the government is far from the answer. It cuts off our agency in the matter, and therefore is a corrupt law. The kicker is that the guy who runs the website is an advocate of "personal freedom" and limited government. Such hipocrisy.
The website is here:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/07/17/plastic-shopping-bags-being-banned.aspx?CommentPosted=true&PageIndex=2
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