Motives And Meanness

     Some years ago, the wife of a friend argued vehemently that government charity – yes, she used that phrase – is superior to private charity because “private givers have bad motives.” I asked her to elaborate, and she mumbled about “image polishing” and “tax deductions.” She felt those (imputed) motives invalidate private charity ab initio. Plainly, she was less concerned with the effects of government welfarism than with private givers’ reasons for giving.

     They who attack free-market advocates often do so by saying “all you care about is money,” or the equivalent. The substance of the argument against government intervention in the market is ignored. Would people be better off financially were the government excluded from meddling in commerce and trade? If you want people to be better off, isn’t that where the argument should go?

     The fusillades over abortion are particularly low. Abortion-“rights” fanatics keep claiming that pro-lifers “hate sex” or “want to enslave women.” They use fallacious slippery-slope claims like “you’ll go after contraceptives next.” But ask them Is a child in the womb a human being? The silence is deafening.

     The promotion of motives over all else is about as vile an argumentative tactic as I’ve seen. Especially as the people prone to doing it are no more capable than you or I of reading others’ minds. Yet there’s a lot of it going on, especially today.

     Christ told us to judge the tree by the fruit it bears. How else are we to distinguish good methods from bad ones? He also told us, concerning the souls of others, to “judge not, that ye be not judged:” perhaps the most striking of all counsels against moral hypocrisy. I commend it to the attention of those who attack a man’s motives rather than his arguments. We will know your motives from the destruction wrought by the policies you favor… and by whether you defend them, and how vehemently.

     Apologies, Gentle Reader. I had to get it out before it burned a hole through my stomach. I’m so disgusted with the state of politics and rhetoric today that I’ve been eyeing the Barrett .50 and the emergency package of Oreo Double-Stufs^® again. Apropos of which: You’ve ruined the Oreo, Nabisco, and no mistake. The cookie lovers of this land demand a reckoning!