From the Easy Chair

Charity versus Welfarism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 151-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DA191

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DA191, Charity versus Welfarism, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 301, November the third, 1993.

Tonight Douglas Murray, Otto Scott and I will discuss the subject of private charity versus public Welfarism. Mark Rushdoony is away for a conference so he is not in our circle tonight.

Now the question of private welfare versus public charity is a very important one and I stress the word versus. We fail to realize that late in the last century and early in this one various socialist writers were very vigorous in their hostility to private charity. Their statement at times was that it never solved the problem. Of course, that is not the question. Until much further along in history we cannot speak of man having solved the problems that confront him. And certainly Welfarism has not solved the problem either.

Basically the question is one of which is most effective? Which is the best for society at large? One of the problems we face now is the crumbling infrastructure of our major cities in this country and of cities abroad, sewer lines that are decaying, sewer systems that are pouring untreated material into the ocean, water mains that are collapsing, bridges decaying so that in some cities where you have a number of bridges commuters turn on the radio to see which route they can take that morning because the others may be closed.

And so on and on. The infrastructure is collapsing because Welfarism is eating up the cities. And yet that infrastructure was built up by immigrant labor. What the city of New York owes to the Irish immigrants who came over and went to work is incalculable. But Welfarism has taken away from the tax payer and from the city vast sums of money and made it very difficult for the city to maintain, repair and advance its infrastructure. So we have world wide decaying cities.

One European writer in the 70s wrote that the coming dark age would come as a result of the collapse of the infrastructure of cities because of the inability of the cities to finance their restoration.

Now all of this has come about with Welfarism which has been growing by leaps and bounds. And private charity is no longer approved by many sociologists. It has faced, since World War II, many handicaps that the law has created and yet in spite of that we have a growing return to private charity.

Well, with that general introduction, Douglas, would you like to say something?

[ Murray ] Well, just a couple of points. I believe it was Lenin who said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but we have rewritten that. Now welfare has become the new opiate of the masses and it is virtually world wide. Here in the United States we have had it institutionalized here long enough so that we have had four to five successive generation... generations of welfare recipients and we have witnessed the complete loss of every shred of work ethic and a sense of personal responsibility for taking care of one’s self. And I think it is becoming apparent to more and more people that instead of giving people a fish to feed them for a day that the only real humane thing is to teach people how to fish so that they can feed themselves.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... the whole business of charity is ... has always been difficult. I mean how to keep charity from making the giver proud and the recipient dependent is a conundrum that nobody has managed to solve. But the difference between charity and welfare, well, let’s put it another way. On the... on the charitable thing you begin with the fact that every system so far ever devised as far as we know, has created redundant people that at least every modern system there has been no way to provide opportunities for everybody or, at least, opportunities that everybody will accept. If the fellow is hungry enough he will go to work no matter what. The church in its days of governance put people to work. The people who joined the church had to go to work. The monks worked. The priests worked and the nuns worked and the people that the church helped had to work. Greymore in New York and various and sundry other places still provide charity on the basis of work. Reformed alcoholics would go and knock on the door and they would be put to work of several days and they would be fed and given a place to stay on temporary basis. But welfare in the sense that Rush was talking is something else.

The subway system of New York is in great decay and when I was living there under Lindsey they had to seal off a number of the subway branches because they were getting too dangerous to use. And it was interesting that they sealed them off, but they never changed the subway maps in the stations. So they were still showing routes which they didn't use.

Now what led to the decay of the subway? First of all, the subways were built by private corporations, private companies and it was true they used immigrant labor because immigrant labor was what New York was mainly, mainly consisted of for a large part of the 19th century and part of the 20th.

Then the Socialists began to hammer at the ...at the private corporations that were operating the subways, claiming that they were making too much money when the fare was five cents. For one nickel you could travel everywhere in New York on the subway and that was true all through my childhood and up until post World War II. When finally the complaints about this ill gotten gains of the corporations that ran the subway finally convinced the people the city of New York put up a certain amount of money and bought the subways and then made them city franchises or city owned, operated properties. And, of course, they didn’t even keep up the maintenance. Now I understand the subway fare is somewhere between 75 cents and a dollar and they jump own, I understand that many of the drivers... the riders jump over the turnstile. They don’t even bother to pay. And there are so many of them and do it so frequently that nobody does anything about it.

Well, so there are several things happened here. First of all, the infrastructure that Rush talked about is crumbling. Secondly, the transportation system is crumbling. Third, what remains of the transportation is beyond the income of the poor people in the city. The homeless are using the subway tunnels as places to live. They are extremely dangerous. People are being shoved off the platform every so often because they might be wearing a suit with a vest or, if it is a woman, they may look too attractive. There is a sign in the subway now advertising surgical remedies for women whose earrings have been torn out of their ears and who need to be patched up. And there are so many that they ... the physicians advertise their services and so forth.

So what we are... when we start to talk about charity here or Welfarism, it leads us almost inescapably into the retrograde nature of the culture.

Now I heard and I will stop with this point, I was ... Anne told me that she heard on the air that Yeltzin in Moscow has gathered up all the homeless in Moscow and had them put into some concentration place, some place where he says they are going to be taken care of. But they are off the street. That is the totalitarian answer and we are beginning to see hour by hour the man that we have backed in Russia. Now we have no means of taking care of the homeless now, although we spend more on welfare than any nation in the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I have seen in more ways than one over the years the slander of charitable activities in favor of creating a statist alternative. I will illustrate with one facet, adoption. Now it used to be before World War II and through World War II until around 1950 or thereafter that if a girl were in trouble and was expecting out of wedlock contact was made with a pastor or with the Salvation Army or with a priest and the result was there would be an investigation if you can call it that, as to the father and his background, his aptitudes, characteristics and then the pastor or priest could go to the parents who wanted a child and say, “Here is a baby that is going to be born. These are the facts about the father and the mother. So this is what you can expect will be something of the aptitude and the nature of the child. It will be of this or that national background.”

It was a good system. It worked. It provided untold numbers of people with children that they knew quite a bit about before the child was born.

Well, what happened about that time was that a barrage of hostile views of adoption were published. Even the Saturday Evening Post which was at that time very conservative published a piece that I thought was outrageous to the nth degree. What was happening at that time was that some criminal group for a while was buying children from some of these mothers and selling them to wealthy prospective parents.

Now in the reports that were published, what they did was to put state sponsored adoptions on one side and criminal and Christian adoptions on the other side. Then they compared them. Then they damned all the Christian adoptions because a certain percentage of them involved selling the baby and so on, which, of course, was the criminal type of adoption. Now that was the kind of dishonest means used to condemn adoption. And similar studies were made to show that orphanages were bad places because there were 60 children under the care of a couple. I am thinking of one home in particular which produced only boys of exemplary character, but the ratio was bad according to your sociologists. Therefore, homes had to be condemned and state institutions replaced them.

I cite this to indicate the kind of dishonesty that was routine in order to persuade the public that the state should take over.

[ Murray ] Well, simply the motive is to gain control.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well I was sent down to... by the Christian Herald some years back...

[ Rushdoony ] Their bowery mission.

[ Scott ] Yes, to the bowery mission, which was one of the first. And to do an article on the bowery mission. And, of course, I... I spent a week or so there. It was around this time of the year some years back in... in the early 60s, I believe. So that is a generation ago. They never printed the article because I had in the article the fact that there were a bunch of black men who had invaded the bowery at that time and were murdering and stealing from the drunks. And the bowery... the... the publication didn’t have the nerve to publish this and I wouldn’t let them change it. So the article was never published.

But the bowery mission was interesting and, of course, you know, it was a regular mission. I mean they ... there are only a certain number of beds and there were a certain number of benches and the chapel. The benches were used as well as the beds and even under the benches there was room for them men to... the men went through a shower and delousing chamber. They were fed. They had to have a sermon. They listened to a sermon. The people who work in the... in the mission were... with the exception of the people actually running it, all the workers were people who had come in from the street and were sobering up and recovering and they did have a fair number of recoveries, because then they would help them get a job and so forth.

So it was an open ended thing. One summer, one ... no, one Sunday, rather, a bunch of apple cheeked young people arrived from lower Pennsylvania. They were Amish. And they came up in cars and trucks bringing a great truck load of... of food and they sang and so forth and then they were really startling contrast with the denizens of New York and especially the bowery. Now this was charity. The Christian charity.

The city of New York was going to extraordinary efforts to try to close down the bowery mission. They found some regulation or another almost all the time that wasn’t up to their high standards. And they wanted what the city wanted was to be the only poor master, as they used to call it, in the area. And the bowery mission was... was fighting for its life. I never did.... I tried to find out what officials were promoting this and what was the source of their animus, but I couldn’t get anywhere. Nobody would talk.

[ Murray ] Well, I think it is ... it creates a lot of new jobs for welfare workers. It creates a new positions that didn't exist before. You take a look at the number of people working and that field and it is... it swelled tremendously and every... and every state and every city all over the country.

[ Scott ] Well, they haven’t put them to work.

[ Murray ] Well, they are... they are non productive job, because they don’t produce ... they don’t produce a product.

[ Rushdoony ] The father of one of our trustees, Wayne Johnson, was the man who ran in Richmond, Virginia the rescue mission there. To him it was an important thing to do so because he had been converted through one. He was the black sheep son of a very prominent Swedish family. His one brother was a bishop. The other brother was chief justice of the Swedish Supreme Court.

[ Scott ] That is enough to make a black sheep out of anybody.

[ Rushdoony ] And he came here and got into serious trouble, but was saved in a rescue mission. And yet Wayne said all the time that he was growing up he would hear slighting references of rescue missions as though somehow they were not all together respectable and churches speaking of them as para church activities as though somehow that rendered them unfit. And yet their work is outstanding. We had some years ago a long article by Mr. Whitehead, a veteran who is in charge of a rescue mission in Santa Anna, California. The city tried to put him out of business on all kinds of technical grounds even though the facility was marvelously maintained. It was a very superior facility. The interesting thing was they... they depreciated its importance and it is work as though, well, he may help one or two, but it is a center for all kinds of street people. You never saw them loitering around outside. They took them in immediately.

At the city council meeting the auditorium was packed with countless number of men standing along the walls, all men who were now working men, businessmen, prominent figures in the community who had been saved and had their life redirected by that rescue mission. But it didn't stop the city fathers. As soon as the furor over that showing died down they tried in a variety of little ways to pick at the mission and limit its abilities, because, of course, across the street was the welfare office and the comparison between those who came and went between the two was very real.

Those who came to the rescue mission, a fair percentage of them were changed and made into very, very superior people. Those who did not found a grace and a helpfulness there that opened them to possible future change. But across the street you had grumblers who came and whined while taking state and federal money.

[ Scott ] I worked with Buford Peterson for a while. Buford Peterson in New York City had a rescue mission. He didn’t call it a mission. He called it fellowship center, because Buford was not a clergyman. He was a very interesting fellow. He was... I was sent to him or his name was brought u to me by Mark Hannah III, Mark Hannah who was the grandson of the Mark Hannah working at the time for Hearst. And he said he had worked with Buford and his fellowship center for a while and he said he had done all he could for him, but he was now running out of ideas in terms of publicity and things like that. So he said, “Why don’t you see what you can do? He is really worth helping.”

So I went up and met Peterson and Peterson was an interesting fellow. He ... he had... he was a... a... started out badly and he had done time for robbery and he at the time he was ... he was arrested for non support and he had a wife and several children sent to Ryker’s Island penitentiary. He was in the penitentiary one evening when he thought he was dying. He knew he was dying in the way he described it to me. And he felt a great regret that he had misspent his life and death said, in effect, what would you do if you had another chance. And he said, “I would try to see... try to help other poor devils from winding up here this way.”

And the spirit retreated and the following morning he was in a breakfast line when one of the guards came over and said, “Are you getting out today?” And he said, “No.” Well the guard said something happened to you. You look different. And later that day he got a call from his probation officer. They were going to let him out, some sort of a deal that she had managed to make. So he got out and he rented a storefront and he went around to the neighborhood and he begged some food and clothing and what not and he hung up a shingle, “Fellowship Center.” And at the time I talked to him he had been running for several years, a number of years. He took in people from institutions, men and women of all races, no matter what the problem was. He would put them up. He would take care of them. Of course, he had limited resources. And he wanted to get some of the welfare money that was flowing all over the place.

And I did several things. I got him some publicity, of course. I also wrote an outline, a story outline for him, because I thought it would be a good book. And I think I called it The Second Life of Buford Peterson. I took it to one of the big agents and the agent said it was... it looked like a good story. He thought he could sell it, but if somebody else wrote it, because, he said, “I don’t see any pictures when I read your writing,” and he said, “We need somebody that has a more dramatic touch.” And he gave me a choice between Eddy Love who had written Subways are for Sleeping and another fellow whose name I can’t remember who wrote the ... I think it was the Pierson story about a baseball player. And fine... he said, “Either that,” or he said, “I can’t handle it at all.”

Well, it was Peterson’s story and I ... I have never been hard up for writing projects so I said, “Well, either one if you want to take it, go ahead and take it.”

They couldn’t sell it because the guy he turned it over to bore down in the outline on the derelicts and... and... and that sort of nonsense and one of the big publishing companies wanted to know when they changed precisely. And, of course, nobody knows if any one is going to change and nobody knows if they do change when they change or how they change. That... Peterson was such a transparently helpful man. In... in... his personality was like that of a foreman. He was a very masculine, very direct, very down to earth fellow. And he had a touch for all these people.

Finally I went to the authorities and they said he doesn’t have any methodology. And I said... and your story reminded me of it, Rush. I said, “If I bright a hundred people here physically to swear that their lives had been changed, would you accept that as evidence?” And he said, “No.”

Later on Peterson died of a heart attack and, of course, fellowship center died with him. But ... and he never got the recognition that he wanted, not for himself, but for his project. But he did put his children through college and he did end as a great fellow.

[ Rushdoony ] In the history of charity, of course, the Christian faith looms very, very large. In other religions there are sometimes, not always, will be charity. In Hinduism it is virtually non existent,

[ Scott ] My impression is it goes the other way.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The people take care of the priests.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But in Christianity very early the Church tied charity to penitence. And therefore the mark of a penitent man was his readiness to be charitable. This did not end with the Reformation. It was differently worded, but repentance meant a new direction and it meant making restitution for your past sins by a present service to God and to man and charity was an essential part of it.

Now the forms a charity took are numerous. It has included from very early loans to young men to help them to start a trade. It has included apprenticeship, bread gifts. It has included hospitals, work among the deaf, dumb and blind, work among prisoners, working against the slave trade, alleviating the poverty of the poor, soup kitchens, charity schools, work houses, Sunday schools, orphanages, foundling hospitals, debt relief and a great deal more.

Thrift clubs, by the way, were started by Christians as an act of charity to help people who were poor establish thrift patterns.

So there was a great deal done over the centuries to help needy people.

Now all of this ... oh, redemption of captives. From the early centuries into early modern times was a very important thing. Then lectureships were endowed and at some of the British universities some of the more prestigious lectureships were endowed for charitable reasons earlier, although now they have simply become of benefit to intellectuals. They no longer have an evangelical function.

[ Scott ] They were taken over by the Socialists.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. So the work of charity extended to every area of life and thought.

[ Scott ] Well, I remember on the business of Howard’s End the movie. I went to see it at Liz’ suggestion. In fact, I think we were in Seattle and we went to see it together. It is taken from a novel. Howard’s End is the name of an estate. And in the novel a young man is attracted to a very beautiful woman whom he lost to a capitalist, a business man. And the business man met this young fellow and looked down on him. That was one of the pivotal relationships in the book. And the time of the book is about, let’s say, 1910, something like that, turn of the century. Well, when I reviewed it...well, first when I discussed it with Liz I said, “Now that was a very poor book, a very bad story, because a business man of that genre... of that time meeting a decent young man anxious to find work would have found work for him. It would have been automatic. My father would have done it. In fact, it was a well know business practice up through the... well, I suppose up to World War II. I don’t know about after the war, although after the war I myself found jobs for a number of people.

It was always considered at least in my generation something that you did automatically.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] If you knew somebody that needed a job and you knew somebody else that might steer him toward one, well, you put them together without a second’s thought. And it was almost a duty. And it think I put on tape here one time about a family friend who lent me some money when I was starting in New York. And when I tried to repay him he said, “I don’t want that.” And I said, “Well, what shall I do?” He said, “Pass it on.”

[ Rushdoony ] I recall a good many years ago when I was in the South having dinner one evening with two men, one of them a doctor. And he was a bit late and he excused himself because the work had been very heavy at the hospital and this had been his week when he donated his services at the hospital to care of the needy, which, in that community, was the black community. And this used to be routine.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Doctors rotated and took care sometimes a week, sometimes as much as a month and a year, depending on the area of the needy persons either in a clinic or in a county hospital.

[ Scott ] Well, lawyers did pro bono work.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It was expected. Well, the... the government has moved in for the lawyers and... and set up what do they call them? Public counselors.

[ Rushdoony ] Public defenders.

[ Scott ] Public defenders. And the physicians, I don’t know how they operate now. There were charity hospitals and, of course, the charity hospitals in recent decades turned into something else. I mean some of the big hospitals in the Presbyterian medical center in New York... it used to be known as Presbyterian medical center.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is now known as just straight medical center. They took the word out so it wouldn’t offend.

They still qualify as charity hospitals because they put up one free bed a year. So they get in under the wire, but the changes go through all the inter {?} and levels of society. What puzzles me right now is how any nation can spend so much money in welfare and have so many charitable groups and have so many homeless.

[ Murray ] It is not working.

[ Scott ] Obviously not.

[ Murray ] Nobody ever points out the results. Oh, this is one of the thing that I think has made {?} effective, because he has dug out the facts and dug out the inconsistencies and keeps throwing this up to them when they make these ridiculous statements because government leaders have become accustomed to not being questioned, of having their statements not questioned in the... in the press or by anybody else.

[ Scott ] Well, there is another element and I think I was the element that I ran into on the bowery covering the bowery story of the blacks beating up and preying on the drunks.

Now there were several things about the bowery. One thing was that the police used to pick them up when the weather got a little cold and hustle them off to jail. And they would wind up in Ryker’s Island and they had a drying out process in Ryker’s Island because, you know, some of these fellows could stop drinking suddenly was to precipitate convulsions and all kinds of things which I never saw, by the way, with the drug addict. The drug addicts can quit with much less trouble than a ... than a real alcoholic can. But in at least physically speaking. But at any rate, the police used to lock them up for the winter. And the judges used to give them 30 or 60 or 90 days for the liquor.

Then some civic minded people said that this was a revolving door. This was a punishment. This was a mistreatment of sick people. So, of course, the police left them alone and they froze to death in the street.

[ Rushdoony ] I would like to read something from a book that is not favorable to private charity because the author B. Kirkman Grey was, I believe, a Fabian Socialist. But it is A History of English Philanthropy: From the Dissolution of the Monasteries to the Taking of the First Census. Now I would like to read just part of one paragraph to give you an idea of how far we have come.

“One of the results of the dissolution of the monasteries was that the roads of the country fell rapidly into a state of disrepair. The monks had found it to their interest to maintain them since as landed proprietors dealing in agricultural produce the facility and cheapness of transit had been a matter of businesslike concern to them. The monasteries had also held in trust numerous charitable gifts for this purpose. For from a very early period this had been a popular object of bequest. And, after the Reformation, gifts for mending highways and bridges continued to hold a leading position among the minor charities. They are to be found in several counties. In some cases, as that of Kingston and Surrey, we find a whole series of bequests of the single object of maintaining the great bridge and highway so that everyone might pass freely.”

Now this was not England only. It was true in France and elsewhere on the continent so that a great deal of what we call now public works, that is statist activity, was at one time entirely the work of charitable groups.

[ Scott ] That is very interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] There was not an area of life that was not in the hands of private charities so that most government outside of the courts and the police was in non statist hands. And in many countries, as in England, church courts still had control over a great many things, family law for example, long after the Reformation. And they had legal powers behind them. This meant that the state had relatively little to do and a great deal of it was handled without public funds.

[ Scott ] Well, we have today some very odd businesses, hangovers. I took the barge up the river in New York on this assignment for the Christian Herald. It was an interesting assignment. I, incidentally, was never paid for it, although I wrote it. They... the Christian charity didn’t extend that far of the writers. But I did take the... the barge with the cadavers to the island that they used and I can’t think of the name of the island now off hand.

There was an island in New York Harbor where they buried paupers and they had trenches and they had simple pine coffins and they also had very small coffins for the infants. They were in... at least now we are talking about a generation ago. We are talking about the early 60s and great numbers of illegal or... or unregistered births and the... the infant was simply tossed someplace. Today it gets on the air and they... there were quite a good number in a city the size of New York.

There used to be a monument on that island of those who were buried there with a cross. The cross had to be removed because of protests from anti Christians and non Christians on the theory that it was possible that a non Christian was among the dead and that this would be offensive to their spirit although the groups who made the argument didn’t believe in spirits, but...

[ Rushdoony ] But they believed in the rights of the dead.

[ Scott ] Extremely good. So therefore the arms of the cross were knocked off as they had been in the military cemeteries across the country leaving just a ... a thing. And I think... I believe there was an inscription some... somebody paid to have put. And it was like going on the river sticks because the barge went up early in the morning just about dawn and it was interesting that they were... the... the coffins, the boxes, the graves and so forth, they were communal graves in a way, but they were respectfully handled.

Now I don’t believe any other writer has ever made that trip. I have never seen a story on it. But in a century ago or perhaps a little more in Dickens’ time all visitors to the United States used to go to poor houses for orphanages, to jails and to hospitals to evaluate the society. The ... these were the places where the handling of the sick, the old, the poor and the dead were used as earmarks by which you could grade the level of civilization. That is no longer the case.

[ Murray ] Well, we have become like Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels. We have got all of these regulations where anyone who deals in charity has to be a certified professional.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Murray ] They have to be government approved. You can’t do anything for anybody anymore without a danger of being prosecuted for stepping outside your... your area of expertise.

[ Scott ] Well, they are... they are arresting people for feeding the poor in the city. San Francisco and several others because they don’t have a proper license.

[ Murray ] Well, I... I think the motivation there is that they don’t want to draw them in. They are afraid that more will show up.

[ Scott ] No, I think it is just the lack of certification.

[ Rushdoony ] Grey makes a very important point without, I think, fully appreciating its importance, because he just mentions it and passes on. In the old Christian order of the medieval period and the Reformation era there was a strong hierarchical concept of responsibility, social responsibility. The more you had, the more your duty to help those who did not have. The greater your position, the greater your responsibility so that if you were a person of any consequence it was your duty to remember all those who were on a lower level economically or were poor. And with John Locke and others, we passed from that concept of hierarchical responsibility to the social contract in which all men were on an equal level and in which there was some kind of supposed social contract in the beginning and it went from a level of responsibility to a level of bargaining so that the only way you can get something is to force it out of someone else so that an animistic situation was created by the concept of the social contract. Men no longer saw themselves as having a responsibility to others simply because they had more than others. So this was a major revolution.

[ Scott ] Well, I still believe that one shouldn’t discuss his own charities. And, as you know, the mail is very heavy with appeals.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] For various and sundry causes and I think that anybody who can afford it ought to be giving some money to somebody and to some groups, but I... I will never forget that book by the retired minister, The Magnificent Obsession.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Lloyd C. Douglas.

[ Scott ] Lloyd C. Douglas. Did you ever read it? Well, it was an interesting book. The Magnificent Obsession really was the injunction to be charitable, but it wouldn’t work if you told people. And that is one of the tenets of the ... what is it, the dei, the Spanish layman’s organization the Catholic organization.

[ Rushdoony ] Opus Dei.

[ Scott ] Opus Dei where they do good works anonymously. I remember I was in a... in an establishment in New York on the eve of Christmas once and a fellow pointed out Marx the toy man who had, he said, taken a truck load of toys down to a poor district and distributed them to the kids. And I said, “How does that get out?” And he didn’t know what I meant. But in my opinion it negated the gesture. I am surprised he didn’t have a photographer with him.

So I don’t think... I don’t know where the world is now because I am not in the same communal position that I used to be in. I don’t know what is done. I know that a corporation like Black and Decker, for instance, gives a million and a half away every year. Every large corporation give away a lot of money, but it has to be very careful not to give any money to a religious group because it gets terrible complaints from {?} who don’t belong to that group, especially Christian groups. Christian groups are off the list.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But for donations from the government they are not part of, what are ... what are they called? A city wide thing?

[ Rushdoony ] The United Way.

[ Scott ] The United Way. They are not included in the United Way. And now I understand under Mr. Clinton’s new tax law that at the end of the year cancelled checks to your church is not sufficient. You have to get a statement from the church at the end of the year or from the foundation, otherwise you can’t... a canceled check is not proof of a contribution.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the hostility to private charity is intense. We have seen it, of course, at Chalcedon in the last couple of years because of John Upton. John Upton accomplished what no one else was able to do. Highly organized, well financed groups were trying to get children out of Romania and could not do it. And others were getting them out through the aid of international and national statist agencies. And John simply challenged their right to monopolize the whole thing, which they are a process of doing on an international scale.

Well, of course, trying to stop John Upton when he wants to do something requires an armored tank which they didn’t think to use. And he succeeded, but the hostility was enormous. The slander that was circulated about him on an international scale was incredible. And providentially Wayne Johnson had secured the assistance of Congressman Bart... Congressman Richard Pombo and, subsequently, Bart Gordon and others came to his aid. If it had not been for that, the smear would have been publicized everywhere.

Well, our time is nearing an end. Is there something that you would like to say by way of conclusion?

[ Murray ] Well, there is so much more to say about this. Everyone has to think about this in terms of their own life. Many people have given up thinking about their participation in charitable work because they assume that the government has taken it over and, in effect, shut them out because they don’t feel qualified or they are intimidated. But I think that has to be challenged.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Otto, something you would like to add?

[ Scott ] Well, I really don’t know what the situation is like today. I don’t know how many people give. I don’t know how they give. My impression is pretty much as Doug said. It is that there is an assumption that the government is taking care of the poor when the government is not.

And, of course, anonymous charity means that you ... the person doesn’t feel any gratitude, because how can you be grateful to an impersonal agency. I heard that years ago from Tammany Hall people. They said, “When we help the poor we don't ask them for their vote. We don’t have to ask them for their vote. We automatically get it, because we helped them.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one of the problems with Welfarism is that it is inevitably political. This has been clearly in evidence in the former Yugoslavia. Under John Upton’s direction my sister-in-law {?} and my brother Hague have been in the process of trying to help some Serbian children and they probably have a couple of them right now in the United States. I haven’t checked. But these Serbian children, bomb victims, were refused any kind of medication or pain killers. One of them died in the process. While Moslem children in Bosnia without any injuries, but congenital conditions were being ostentatiously flown elsewhere for help.

Now I have no question that children who need it whether they are Moslem or not should be helped, but it was politicized. And everything in the way of medical help was denied to the Serbians, totally denied to them. So the situation when the state gets in becomes political. And we and Britain and other countries express their disfavor of the Serbs by refusing to help children where as the countries that were favorable to the Serbs were not able to get in and out. This is the political aspect that is so devastating and evil.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.