When The Anointed One spoke at a town hall meeting on Tuesday some of the crowd reacted as though he had performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes. One man wept with joy and praised God for some apparent intervention in allowing the new Messiah to take time out of his day and grace them with his nearness. Anyone who thought Sarah Palin’s belonging to a charismatic church was weird ought to get a load of this guy. I expected that at any moment he would collapse to the floor in ecstasy, but he remained upright long enough to petition the Great One to pull a better benefits package for part-time McDonalds workers out of the magical government basket. Can I just say:

Oh.  My.  God.

Another woman present was hoping that the Messiah could get her a house and NeoBama generously offered to get her the phone number of some government bureaucracy that specializes in seeing whether people qualify for help. She also was overcome and cried tears of relief and gratitude.

Then some Republican just gave her a house.

Representative Nick Thompson’s wife, Chene, offered Henrietta Hughes the home she had bought after law school but was no longer using. Interestingly, the headlines all note that Hughes was given a home after appealing to Obama. You have to delve into the article to find out it was some other compassionate person who helped her and then you have to google to find out the party affiliation of the Rep whose wife was so generous.

This is the difference between small government conservatives and big government liberals in a nutshell. Small government conservatives want the charitable impulses of humanity to thrive without the stifling effects of Robin Hood liberals. Liberal Elitists want to establish boards and committees and departments to be staffed with all of their incredibly clever elitist cohorts to sit around and devise ways to help everyone in the world. While they are planning, churches are actually feeding the poor. When Obamassiah offered a phone number, Chene Thompson offered a gift.

Look, it is only commonsense that says money that citizens use to directly and actively help others is going to be more efficient than money that is cycled through a bureaucracy first. More importantly, the federal government is lousy at everything they do. They have no profit incentive to perform well. They have no ability to distinguish the needy from the lazy. If only one in a hundred of those who received welfare payments in 2005 were truly capable of working, that is 20,000 people the government helped to be a failure. If every one of those received just $500 a month in aid (food stamps, cash, Medicaid), we are talking $120 million thrown away. 

Okay, so $120 million is nothing to our big spenders in Washington. What about the enabling effect on the lives of these individuals? Let us look at another recent news item: Nadya Suleman, the mother of fourteen who is on welfare and has had three sets of twins through IVF; three of her twins are receiving state funded disability treatments, and now she has octuplets implanted. 

Suppose this woman had to go to a local charity when she got pregnant the first time. Think they might have made her feel a little shame? Maybe been a bit judgmental as they helped her out? After having to ask for personally for hand-outs while looking the giver in the eye, maybe Nadya would have thought twice before the second implantation. Would she feel stigmatized? I certainly hope so. Stigma plays an important role in curbing stupid, reckless and selfish behavior.

Hilary Clinton loves to talk about the ‘Village’ and its role in raising children, but the trend of Liberal Elites has been to set themselves up as the central planners of the village. Hence, we have people expecting the leader of the free world to attend to their job dissatisfaction rather than tending to their own personal failure to advance beyond part time McDonalds work after four years. This is no village. All of America cannot be a village any more than the Pacific can be a puddle, and it is Hilary and those like her who have destroyed the villages we once had.

We need to cast off the chains of this centralized, socialistic, liberal control orgy and reclaim the individual fortitude that made these United States great. For we are the United States of America. Many solitary and sovereign states with an agreement to stand with one another for common defense and furtherance of the pursuit of our liberties. Our founders recognized that maintaining decentralized power would allow each state to best cater to the desires and needs of its own constituency and most importantly, that tyranny waged in one state could be brought into check by the states around it. By contrast, tyranny waged by the federal government is tyranny suffered by all and inescapable within the confines of our nation.

The conservative approach to charity is a microcosm of this ideal. We recognize that those closest to the source of a need can best cater to the particular requirements of that need in order to abolish it, unlike checks from some faceless bureaucracy, which makes no judgment calls. They cannot say whether this person needs counseling or rehab. They do not know whether the recipient is a deadbeat or in genuine trouble, and they rob those around the needy of both their money and their charitable impulses by shackling them to big brother’s version of benevolence.

The generosity of Mrs. Thompson in the face of President Obama’s promise of a bureaucratic solution was a perfect display of the differences between the small government and big government philosophies. Ask Henrietta Hughes which one is more effective.