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Health Care Policy Center

Charitable Donations vs. Taxes

If you don't feel comfortable forcing your friend to help someone or donate to a charity, should you vote for a politician, your representative, the empowers government agents to do so? This video illustrates the point.

Here’s a short video illustrating the coercion behind government-mandated charity.

For more, see GeorgeOutToHelp.com.

I discuss related issues in my Huffington Post article, Questioning your “compassionate” politics. For example, if you really care about helping a certain group of people, asking government to do it is the last thing you should want. This is like committing yourself to donate to a charity forever, regardless of its efficiency and effectiveness.

I found this post via a link to Reason.tv in comment on Arnold Kling’s post, “Donations vs. Taxes.”  In response to criticism, Kling writes:

[T]he idea that I need to show my gratitude to others by expressing support for coercion seems perverse. I would think that voluntary donations would be a much more sincere expression of gratitude than joining in the project of collective coercion.