Sunday, January 12, 2014

Human Nature And Charity

If you take 20 dollars and give a dollar to every son-of-bitch in a room, and come back a year later, one of the bastards will have most the money. I mean it’s just human nature and you aren’t gonna whip it with a lot laws. I think when you make people conscious --as communication gets better -- of somebody in trouble--starving our something like that--the average person will help. But of course now you’ve got so damn many charities and there’s so much professionalism – you know -- if you have a charity you hire some professionals to work up the charity and by the time you get the money you get 4 dollars for the recipient and 400 dollars for the administrators.
I find something new every time I listen to that old recording.

15 comments:

chickelit said...

Substitute "government agency" for "charity" and go from there.

The Dude said...

And replace "give" with "extort at gunpoint".

Unknown said...

John Wayne is eternally awesome.

virgil xenophon said...

"extort at gunpoint"

Sometimes it's direct and sometimes it's implied, but the end result is the same old totalitarian statist impulse..

ricpic said...

No matter how right Gulliver is eventually he gets tired, takes a nap and wakes up pinned down by the lilliputians.

Okay, so it's not a perfect analogy...but it's in the vicinity.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

He sounds like he's been smoking dope.

virgil xenophon said...

Yes ricpic, it's the "erosion principle." Over time, the rocks succumb to the waves--and the ideological wave of the left is unrelenting..

chickelit said...

Eric the Fruit Bat said...
He sounds like he's been smoking dope.

He could have been drinking and smoking, but not dope.

edutcher said...

The Duke could nail it.

He once observed, "Life is tough. If you're stupid, life is tougher".

rcocean said...

Heston would've wondered the same thing.

"I thought I was liberal - how did I end up as the Right-winger".

rcocean said...

Great clip. The problem is this year's tolerant person is tomorrow's "racist/bigot/homophobe".

rcocean said...

Wayne stopped smoking after the lung cancer. Don't think he ever stopped drinking. But he could hold his liquor and wasn't an alcoholic.

deborah said...

My angle on that idea is that you could give everyone an identical little house on a piece of land, and before long, some would be rich and some would be poor.

chickelit said...

Deborah, this like my Parable of the Gas. The idea is that to constrain anything to be more nearly equal violates a natural order. In other words, people need to be free to be rich or poor and to be able to move between the two states of rich and poor and all those between those extremes.

deborah said...

Yes, the old yin and yang, can't have one without the other.