Is the Left Christian?

Jesus said to help the poor. But He said to do it with our own resources. He was talking on a personal level - not on a macro-economic policy level. Nowhere did He say that we have the right to take and use and redistribute somebody else's money to help the poor. Nowhere did He say that we should expect the government to provide more and more services for us. And Paul said that believers should work with their own hands to provide for themselves and for the poor.

Neither Jesus' nor Paul's statements were an inauguration of some sort of Socialist welfare system. It was about being personally productive and being voluntarily compassionate with your own resources.

Labour and Greens supporters always pull out that 'compassion for the poor' card. But let's examine it for a minute and see if it's really effective:

Is abortion compassionate? It kills 80,000 babies every year and doesn't appear to be making women any happier.

Is legalizing gay-marriage compassionate? It inevitably results in gay adoption and surrogacy - which is really a form of child abuse because every child deserves both a father and a mother.

Are Labor's huge cash stimulus packages, the proposed resources super profits tax, and increasing welfare programs compassionate?

In less than three years Labor has squandered a multi billion-dollar surplus and turned it into a multi billion-dollar deficit - Australians are going to be paying it off for years. That will make less money available for all of us.

Don't forget companies are not evil entities - they are just made-up of shareholders - everyday Australians like you and me - individuals, mum and dads. So if you hurt the company, you're hurting the very people you claim to be helping. The more you tax the company, there'll be less jobs available for everyone else = more poverty. It also forces prices up, which disadvantages not only all of us but also buyers overseas, resulting in more poverty here and overseas. Then the government needs to increase welfare and foreign aid to make-up for it.

But welfare very often breeds welfare dependency. Public benefits very often destroy personal responsibility, ingenuity and productiveness. Recipients become victims of the system. As someone once said, "The bigger the government the smaller the citizen".

Conservatives don't say there should never be any welfare - in fact, under a conservative government prices are always lower and there is more welfare available for people. Conservatives just don't look to the government for more and more and more. Instead, they focus on the freedom to develop industry - because that's where everything comes from in the first place.

If you want everyone to have more milk, don't milk the milk-cow to death - better to focus on getting the milk cow really really healthy! Or better still - produce more milk-cows. Then everyone will have more milk - not just today, but tomorrow too.

Doesn't that sound like something Jesus would want?