Govern, not Give

Today the media had a field day with the “wonderful” news that President Obama had changed the policy that kept the United States from giving aid to organizations in foreign countries that provided or counseled toward abortions. This was hailed as a step towards helping poor women because many health clinics which provided basic services could not get the taxpayer money simply because they allowed abortions. Naturally, being pro-life, I did not applaud this change. You see, since there is a finite amount of money available, and since so many of the taxpayers providing that money don’t approve of abortions, it seems reasonable to funnel our money toward the clinics that are in line with the beliefs of the givers. I can remember how my friend felt when she discovered that the union she was required to belong to because of her job started giving her money to Planned Parenthood.

The problem is that the American government doesn’t consider its money to be the money of the American people. And me, being me, my first thought was, “The government is giving how much money to foreign clinics (whether they provide abortions or not)?” Before you decide that I am a heartless beast, hear me out on this one.

I decided to investigate this issue further and found several very ornery articles about the stingy, self-centeredness of the American government. One, very shocking article purported, “Nations where fewer people attend church tend to be more generous in their support for development in poor countries than those where church attendance is much greater.” Could it be so? It seems to contradict everything that we believe about religion. The article went on to explain… “In aid terms Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands led the other 17 donor countries by a wide margin. The worst performer was Japan, followed by Italy, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia in that order.”

Could it be that we are a country full of selfish people? Could it be that we don’t care about the poor? Um…no. The fact remains that the US Government gives more than twice as much aid as any other country in pure dollars. The statistics showing us toward the bottom are based on official government aid spending based on a percentage of the GDP.

I am happy to admit that the government of Denmark gives away way more of its citizens’ money, per capita than ours does. Believe it or not, I am proud of that fact. Would you like to know why? Because the people of the United States give away far more of their own money than the people of other countries do. In 2005, private citizens gave away 1.67% of the GDP without any help from the government. The closest country behind us was Great Britain with .73% of their GDP. For disaster relief, people of the United States gave an estimated $7.37 billion dollars: $5.3 billion for Hurricane Katrina, $1.92 billion for the Tsunami relief, and $0.15 billion for the India-Pakistan earthquake relief. The United States Government was highly criticized for the measly $350 million it gave to tsunami victims. No one wanted to give credit the evil capitalists credit for the $1.92 billion donated by private citizens and corporations.

I guess the point is that the rest of the country can fight over whether it’s prudent to give millions of tax payer’s dollars to abortion clinics in foreign countries. For me, the question is a little different: “Why don’t we trust the American people to decide who they should give their money to?” To me, the purpose of a government is to govern, not to give. The people of this great nation have proven we can give on our own. It’s a lesson in personal responsibility. Let’s not push our leaders to take over our charity, we can do it ourselves. In fact, we can do most things ourselves.