In every election campaign, we hear the word “compassion” at least a thousand times. One political party supposedly has it, the other one doesn’t. Big government programs are evidence of compassion; cutting back government is a sign of cold-hearted meanness. By their misuse of the term for partisan advantage, partisans and ideologues have thoroughly muddied up the real meaning of the word.

The fact is that some of what is labeled “compassionate” is just that, and it does a world of good; but a whole lot of what is labeled “compassionate” is nothing of the sort, and it does a world of harm. The former tends to be very personal in nature, while the latter puts an involuntary burden on someone else.

As Marvin Olasky pointed out in his 1994 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, the original definition of compassion as noted in The Oxford English Dictionary is “suffering together with another, participation in suffering.” The emphasis, as the word itself shows—“com,” which means with, and “passion,” from the Latin term “pati,” meaning to suffer—is on personal involvement with the needy, suffering with them, not just giving to them. Noah Webster, in the 1834 edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language, similarly defined compassion as “a suffering with another.”

But the way most people use the term today is a corruption of the original. It has come to mean little more than, as Olasky put it, “the feeling, or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it.” There is a world of difference between those two definitions: One demands personal action, the other simply a “feeling” that usually is accompanied by a call for someone else—namely, government—to deal with the problem. One describes a Red Cross volunteer, the other describes the typical Progressive demagogue who gives away little or nothing of his own resources but lots of yours.

The plain fact is that government compassion is not the same as personal and private compassion. When we expect the government to substitute for what we ourselves ought to do, we expect the impossible and we end up with the intolerable. We don’t really solve problems, we just manage them expensively into perpetuity and create a bunch of new ones along the way.

From 1965, the beginning of the so-called War on Poverty, to 1994, total welfare spending in the United States was $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. In 1965, total government welfare spending was just over 1 percent of gross domestic product, but by 1993 it had risen to 5.1 percent of GDP annually—higher than the record set during the Great Depression. The poverty rate in 1994 was almost exactly where it was in 1965 and now, 20 years later, it’s even higher. It was apparent when “welfare reform” was enacted in 1996 that millions on welfare were living lives of demoralizing dependency; families were rewarded for breaking up; and the number of children born out of wedlock was in the stratosphere—terrible facts brought about, in large part, by “compassionate” government programs.

A person’s willingness to spend government funds on aid programs is not evidence that the person is himself compassionate. Professor William B. Irvine of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, once explained, “It would be absurd to take a person’s willingness to increase defense spending as evidence that the person is himself brave, or to take a person’s willingness to spend government money on athletic programs as evidence that the person is himself physically fit.” In the same way as it is possible for a “couch potato” to favor government funding of athletic teams, it is possible for a person who lacks compassion to favor various government aid programs; and conversely, it is possible for a compassionate person to oppose these programs.

It is a mistake to use a person’s political beliefs as the litmus test of his compassion. Professor Irvine said that if you want to determine how compassionate an individual is, you are wasting your time if you ask for whom he voted; instead, you should ask what charitable contributions he has made and whether he has done any volunteer work lately. You might also inquire into how he responds to the needs of his relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Many of the political world’s most boisterous welfare statists are also among the most duplicitous and selfish (in the bad sense of the term) hypocrites. While small-government conservatives and libertarians generally give generously from their own pockets, charitable organizations are often lucky to get a little more than token donations from the “progressives” of the world. For a mountain of evidence in that regard, see the 2006 book, Who Really Cares? by Arthur Brooks, then at Syracuse University and now president of the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s worth noting that not even progressives donate to supposedly “compassionate” government agencies a penny more than the law requires them to. There’s nothing illegal about writing out a check to the “Department of Health and Human Services,” but progressives, when they seek to personally help others, tend to write their checks out to private agencies.

True compassion is a bulwark of strong families and communities, of liberty and self-reliance, while the false compassion of the second usage is fraught with great danger and dubious results. True compassion is people helping people out of a genuine sense of caring and brotherhood. It is not asking your legislator or congressman to do it for you. True compassion comes from your heart, not from the state or federal treasury. True compassion is a deeply personal thing, not a check from a distant bureaucracy.

In a television interview in Nassau, Bahamas, in November 2012, I was asked by host Wendall Jones, “Mr. Reed, what about the Good Samaritan in the New Testament? Doesn’t that story show that government should help people?” My reply: “Wendall, what made the Good Samaritan good was the fact that he personally helped the stricken man along the road. If he had simply told the helpless chap to ring up his congressman, no one to this day would have the gall to call him anything but a good-for-nothing.”

“But what about Christianity itself?” Jones then asked me. “Isn’t it in favor of redistribution as a compassionate way to help the poor?” Fortunately, I know a few things about the Bible and Christianity. My reply: “Wendall, the Eighth Commandment says ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ It doesn’t say, ‘Thou shalt not steal unless the other guy has more than you do or unless you’re convinced that you can spend it better or unless you can find a politician to take it on your behalf.’ And even more to the point, a new book on the subject, For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty (link provided below) answers this question in both a detailed and scholarly fashion.

Progressives are often so convinced of their moral superiority that they tend to be very intolerant of a good, opposing argument. Mr. Jones edited out the above exchange before airing the show, but you can see the rest of it here.

The marketplace is often dismissed as a cold, impersonal, and selfish place where compassion takes a back seat to self-interest. But that view ignores some important facts: 1) The marketplace is what produces the wealth that compassion allows you to share or give away; 2) Historically, the freest of societies are the most compassionate in the truest sense of the term; 3) Nothing about being a government employee spending other people’s money makes you more compassionate or effective than the rest of society; 4) Government “compassion” usually gets diverted toward vote-buying and programs that perpetuate the very problems it was supposed to remedy. The news brings daily reminders that there’s no shortage of “harshness” in government—as well as greed, waste, fraud, and inefficiency.

The next time you hear the word “compassion,” probe the person invoking it to find out if he really knows what he’s talking about—or at least to determine if he is compassionate with his own resources.

Summary

• “Compassion” isn’t simply giving something away, especially if what you’re giving wasn’t yours in the first place.
• True compassion means getting personally involved.
• Instinctively, when we want to help others with our own time and resources, we overwhelmingly tend to do so through donations of time and money to private agencies, not to public ones.
• The marketplace, where self-interest is a powerful motivator for the creation of wealth, is therefore the primary source for whatever wealth anybody has to give away.

For further information, see:

“The Politics of Compassion” by William B. Irvine

“Presidents and Precedents” by Lawrence W. Reed

For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty, edited by Anne Bradley and Art Lindsley

“Book Review: The Tragedy of American Compassion by Marvin Olasky” as reviewed by Daniel Bazikian

ABOUT LAWRENCE W. REED

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. Prior to becoming FEE’s president, he served for 20 years as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its department of economics from 1982 to 1984.

EDITORS NOTE: Earlier versions of this essay have appeared in FEE publications under the title, “What Is Real Compassion?” The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.