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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast Author: Joel K. Douglas
Governance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast joelkdouglas.substack.com Language: en Genres: Government, Philosophy, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Can a Nation Survive on Charity?
Monday, 10 November, 2025
Act 1. Andrew CarnegieIt’s 1892. Homestead, Pennsylvania.Andrew Carnegie pays his steelworkers an average of $1.68 a day. About $56 in today’s money. Twelve-hour shifts. Six days a week.The workers and their families shared rooms that smelled like smoke and steel dust. The beds were never cold because workers on different shifts all used them. They ate bread, onions, sometimes meat. The lucky ones had shoes that fit. Nutrition, sanitation, and health were poor. Workplace injuries were common.Meanwhile, Carnegie’s personal annual income in 1892 was approximately $25 million. That’s $830 million in today’s dollars. Per year.Here’s a simple question: Why didn’t he just pay the workers more?Not out of charity or kindness. Just pay them enough that they didn’t have to send their children to work at age ten. Pay them enough that they could afford doctors when they got injured. Pay them enough that their widows didn’t end up in poorhouses.Carnegie’s answer, laid out in his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth, was surprisingly direct. He argued that giving workers higher wages would be wasteful. Most workers lacked the judgment to use extra money wisely. They’d spend it on alcohol, gambling, and frivolous consumption. He wrote, “It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than spent to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy.”Better, Carnegie said, to keep wages low, accumulate wealth, and then give it away strategically. To libraries or universities. Institutions that would uplift the deserving poor, not reward the undeserving.Were his workers not deserving? But in the case of Carnegie, it was also something deeper. A theory about the nature of giving. About the difference between waste and virtue.Let’s test the logic.In 1892, Carnegie Steel employed about 40,000 workers across all operations. If Carnegie had taken just $5 million of his $25 million annual income and distributed it evenly among those workers, each one would have received an extra $125 per year, about $4300 today.That’s not life-changing money. But it’s enough to buy winter coats for your kids. Enough to see a doctor instead of dying from an infected cut. Enough to not send your twelve-year-old to work in the mill.But Carnegie didn’t do that.Instead, over his lifetime, he gave away $350 million to build libraries, concert halls, and universities. He gave 2,811 libraries to communities. So here’s the next question: Why did he consider the second option virtuous, but the first wasteful?A worker who needs $2 a day to feed his family needs it whether you hand it to him on Friday or donate it to a library that his grandchildren might use.We all need heat in the house and food on the table. The need doesn’t change. Only the giver’s relationship to it does.There’s an old idea, older than Carnegie, older than America, that we owe two kinds of debts. Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s, and to God what is God’s. First, our debt to Ceasar. This debt is civic. What we owe to the state, to the community, to the infrastructure that makes our lives possible. Roads, courts, defense, clean water. We pool our resources to build what none of us can build alone.The other debt is moral. What we owe to each other as human beings. Compassion, dignity, the recognition that suffering is real and we have some responsibility to ease it.The civic debt is the price of civilization. We choose to escape chaos. We pay taxes because without a functioning state, there is no property to protect, no contracts to enforce, no prosperity to enjoy.The moral debt is civic friendship, the sense that we share a common life and therefore share some responsibility for each other’s welfare. Our neighbors. Communities. Churches. For most of human history, these debts lived in separate accounts.We paid taxes to keep the state running. We gave alms to benefit those around us in our communities.One was mandatory. One was voluntary. One was civic duty. One was personal virtue. They didn’t compete with each other.But then something changed.By the late 1800s, charity wasn’t just feeding a beggar on the street corner anymore. It was building hospitals. Funding schools. Running orphanages. Feeding entire cities during economic panics.And government wasn’t just maintaining roads anymore. A series of economic depressions and rapid industrial revolution brought a dramatic increase in individual and community needs. People started to ask: What if the state could do what charity does, but bigger, more reliably, for everyone? Suddenly, the two debts started to overlap. State duty, and civic duty, blended together. Blending the two brought philosophical questions. If the government funds hospitals through taxes, do we still need to donate to hospitals?If the state provides old-age pensions, does that make personal charity for the elderly obsolete?If the government takes care of the poor through mandatory taxes, does that rob us of the opportunity to be virtuous?There’s an argument that an act is only morally praiseworthy if it’s done freely, out of genuine choice, not out of compulsion. That we should voluntarily give in secret. By that logic, paying taxes to fund welfare isn’t a moral act. It’s just compliance.But choosing to donate to a soup kitchen is virtue. Proof of your moral character.Carnegie never framed it in philosophical terms, but his entire worldview rested on keeping those two debts separate.The civic debt, what we owe the state, should be minimal. Low taxes, limited government, just enough to keep order and protect property.The moral debt, what we owe our fellow man, should be voluntary, personal, strategic. We give when and how we see fit. And most importantly: the moral debt is where virtue lives.But there’s a problem with this framework: it only works if we assume that our wealth is our own to begin with.What if our wealth is civic obligation? What if the wages we don’t pay, the safety equipment we don’t buy, the unions we crush, weren’t private business decisions? What if they are civic failures?Then our philanthropy isn’t generosity. We are just hurting our neighbors in the name of virtue. Americans donate about $500 billion to charity every year. That’s 2% of GDP.Meanwhile, we spend about $3.7 trillion on what we call government social programs. These are programs like Social Security, Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance. That’s roughly 12% of GDP.Americans prefer smaller government and lower taxes, but at the same time support programs like Social Security and Medicare. So the tension isn’t really about whether government should help people, but about how we want to frame that help, and whether we get credit for it. It’s not because charity is more efficient. Government programs have competitive or lower costs than private charities. Medicare’s administrative costs are competitive or better than private health insurance overhead at 12-18%.It’s not because charity reaches more people. SNAP alone feeds 42 million Americans. Feeding America’s charity network serves about 50 million people annually, including 12 million children and 7 million seniors. One program doesn’t dwarf the other.So is charity better? Some are convinced that only voluntary giving counts as virtue. Paying taxes, even if that money feeds hungry children, is obligation. Donating to a food bank is morality.Same outcome. Different emotional accounting.There’s research on this from blood donation systems. When you compare voluntary donation to paid systems, people value their donated blood more highly.The gift matters because it is a gift. Payment turns a moral act into a transaction.We do the same thing with charity versus taxes. Taxes feel like payment for services. Charity feels like a gift. And we reserve our sense of virtue for the gift.When Carnegie built his libraries, he put his name on them.Not only because he was vain. He sought to demonstrate personal virtue. To show that he, Andrew Carnegie, chose to help. Nobody builds a library with their tax dollars and gets a plaque.June 1892. Carnegie’s workers go on strike. They’re not asking for charity. They’re asking for wages. Enough to live on, enough to not watch their children work twelve-hour shifts in a steel mill.Carnegie refused.We celebrate Carnegie for philanthropy. But paying fair wages wasn’t charity. It was obligation. It’s what he owed workers for their labor. But he thought his workers would just waste their money. He wanted to give, on his terms, in his time, to causes he deemed worthy. Carnegie told himself his wealth was earned purely through genius. His philanthropy let him keep believing that lie. July 6th. Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie’s right-hand man, brought in 300 armed Pinkertons. The battle lasted fourteen hours. Ten men died.He breaks the strike. Destroys the union.And twenty-seven years later, Andrew Carnegie died having given away $350 million to libraries, universities, and concert halls.We remember Carnegie, the philanthropist. We forget Carnegie, the draconian union-buster.Carnegie proved at Homestead that charity alone doesn’t work.When helping people is voluntary, some people simply don’t get help.Carnegie chose libraries over living wages. He chose concert halls over safety equipment. He chose universities over unions.He decided who deserved help, and his workers didn’t make the list. Charity only works when people feel generous, and Carnegie didn’t feel generous toward the men who made him rich.So forty years later, when the Great Depression hit and the soup lines stretched around the block, America made a different choice.We pivoted. If charity fails when it’s voluntary, maybe helping our neighbors needs to be mandatory.Act 2. The New DealIt’s October 28, 1929. The stock market crashes. By mid‑November the market surrendered half its value. It took twenty-five years and twenty-five days, an entire generation, to recover. Only on November 23, 1954, did the Dow Jones Industrial Average climb back to its 1929 peak. Within four years from the crash, 25% of Americans were unemployed. In manufacturing-heavy cities like Detroit and Chicago, unemployment reached 40%. Soup lines stretched around city blocks. Families slept in cars. Children went to school hungry.The charities collapsed.Churches ran out of food by 1931. Community funds dried up. The philanthropists who built hospitals in the 1920s couldn’t make payroll in the 1930s.Carnegie’s libraries still stood. Beautiful buildings. His name carved in stone above the doors. Not one of them fed a hungry child.March 1933. Franklin Roosevelt became president. In his first hundred days, he launched the New Deal. Federal work programs. Unemployment insurance. And in 1935, the Social Security Act.For the first time in American history, old-age insurance became mandatory.Not dependent on charity. Not based on who deserved it. You work, you pay in, you get benefits when you’re old. No application and no judgment. No Carnegie deciding if you’re worthy.Roosevelt’s position in 1932, before he was even president, was: “Aid must be extended by the Government — not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty.” He didn’t reject private charity entirely. He said when private charity fails at scale, the state must step in.Translation: Carnegie was wrong.America chose a different path in 1935. We took the moral debt and made it civic.Helping the elderly wasn’t charity anymore. It was obligation. Feeding children wasn’t generosity. It became law. You don’t get credit for it. You don’t get your name on a building. You just pay your taxes, and the system works.And it did work.Elderly poverty dropped from 50% in 1935 to under 10% by 1995. Millions of people retired without becoming destitute. Social Security became the most popular government program in American history.Then came Medicare in 1965. Medicaid in 1965. Food stamps in 1964, renamed SNAP in 2008. The mandatory system expanded. More people got help. Fewer people starved.Carnegie’s model failed at scale. FDR’s model succeeded.But some never accepted it.From day one, some called Social Security socialist. Medicare was government overreach. SNAP was dependency. The argument never changed: this should be voluntary, not mandatory. This is the government replacing virtue with bureaucracy. Theft disguised as compassion.FDR made helping mandatory. But he couldn’t make believing in it mandatory.So we built a system that half the country thinks shouldn’t exist. We don’t just disagree on funding levels. Half of us believe the programs are fundamentally illegitimate. The other half thinks the system defines morality. If you oppose expansion, you hate the poor. If you want cuts, you want people to starve.So every two years, we fight. Expand or cut. Fund or starve. Save or destroy. Not policy disagreement. Class warfare.And 42 million people wait to see who wins.In the Carnegie model, charity is voluntary. Help who you want, when you want. Some people don’t get help, but nobody’s coerced.When charity was voluntary, we relied on class hierarchy. The rich decided who deserved help. The poor were grateful, or they got nothing. Everyone knew their place.In the FDR model, charity is mandatory. Help becomes a right, not a gift. More people get help, but nobody gets credit.When we made it mandatory, we created class warfare. The rich call it theft. The poor call it rights. Everyone’s enemy is everyone else.Neither system solved the problem.Carnegie’s way: Some people starve, but we call it freedom. FDR’s way: Fewer people starve, but we call each other monsters.Carnegie decided who deserved help; FDR made us fight about it for ninety years.We don’t debate these as policy questions. We debate them as moral referendums. Are you compassionate, or are you cruel? Are you responsible, or are you a socialist?And then, October 1, 2025. While we were still fighting about who deserves help and how much and whether the system should even exist…Act 3. When Both Systems FailOctober 1, 2025. Congress fails to pass a spending bill. The federal government shuts down.By November 1st, SNAP stops. 42 million Americans lose food assistance. Food banks mobilize. Donations pour in. Volunteers show up. The system strains but holds. Then the cracks appear.Houston Food Bank tries to increase output by 50%. They’d need to double it to meet actual need. They can’t.Boston food pantries institute two-week waits. Families with hungry children wait two weeks for food.Central Texas Food Bank CEO Sari Vatske noted, “There is no way that we alone can make up for a $44 million food budget shortfall.”Judith Ingram, a food bank director in Washington, D.C. said: “At some point, you cannot count on the community to take over for what should be a government program.”Food banks are in disaster response mode.But this isn’t a localized event. It’s not an earthquake or a hurricane. In a natural disaster, other regions send help. In a government shutdown, every region is drowning at once.We built two systems and told them to compete. Then we acted shocked when both of them lost.In October 2025, government failed. SNAP stopped. 42 million Americans without food assistance.Charity tried to fill the gap. Private giving. Community support. Neighbors helping neighbors.But charity only works when people feel generous. And people don’t feel generous when they’re scared about their own money.Government programs only work when government works. And right now, we have no government.Both systems failed. Simultaneously.We have enough food. But we can’t get it to anyone because we designed a system that requires constant political consensus to keep working people fed.Neither savior, billionaire or bureaucrat, is coming to help.Act 4. Our Decisive EffortOur Constitution’s framers understood that governments fail. Factions fight. Consensus breaks. Institutions collapse. We can’t rely on government too much.So when they designed the Constitution, they didn’t build a system that requires government to work perfectly all the time. They built a system where citizens could survive when government stopped functioning.That’s why we protect property rights. Why we enforce contracts. Why we divide and limit power. Not because they hated government. But because they knew government would fail, and citizens needed to survive the failure.Article I, Section 8. The Spending Clause. Congress has broad power to spend for the general welfare. Emphasis on the general welfare, not particular interests. Public spending must serve the nation as a whole. But half of American working families needing social program support is wildly excessive and points to a systemic failure: we’ve designed an economy where work doesn’t cover the cost of living.Government intervention is necessary to either fund the government and spend money on social programs or make decisive effort towards closing the gap between what work pays and what life costs. Only giving the power back to the people survives. Right now, we subsidize low wages with taxpayer money. Businesses can pay poverty wages because government fills the gap. What if the incentive structure rewarded businesses that pay enough that their workers don’t need SNAP?We don’t need more subsidies for affordable housing. We need more housing. What if we incentivized small businesses and builders to construct starter homes again? Removed the barriers that make building affordable housing unprofitable?Healthcare costs have outpaced inflation for decades. Nobody has an answer. But we know the current system isn’t working. And subsidizing it through Medicaid doesn’t fix it. It just makes it more expensive for taxpayers.The point isn’t that government should do nothing.The point is that decisive effort matters.We can spend $1 trillion subsidizing poverty wages, unaffordable housing, and broken healthcare. Or we can spend that political capital fixing the systems that create the gap in the first place.We don’t need perfect charity or perfect government. We need the people to have enough resources to survive imperfect institutions.We built two systems and told them to compete.Then we acted shocked when both of them lost.But the real failure wasn’t charity or government.The real failure was building a system that requires dependency instead of enabling capability. Our decisive effort should do what the Constitution promised: secure liberty, establish justice, and promote the general welfare, not for one class, but for all working Americans.May God bless the United States of America.Music from Epidemic SoundArtist: Jett EverillSong: Different Times Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
