It looks like there are a lot of reasonable if not misguided objections to my article. I have to say that I am certainly open to the idea that charity and private organizations could handle feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and so forth. In fact, private industry is nearly always, if not always, better at accomplishing these things than government.
But that wasn’t the point of this article. The point of this article wasn’t the social welfare programs themselves but rather the attitudes that currently empower them. Once we remove the “positive rights” attitude we can open up our society and by extension government to find the best (usually private) solutions to the problems of hunger and real poverty.
However, I will say that any government that lets its citizens starve and go without the opportunity for shelter is illegitimate. So if for some reason charity and private organizations can’t do those things (and I’m not saying they can’t) than the government must.
