A Christmas Carol and Dickensian Charity

A Literary Call to Love Literal Neighbors

I recently had the opportunity to watch a live performance of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, at Ford’s Theatre in DC, which still features live performances (though, one must presume, not of Julius Caesar). The early part of the play features dialogues of Scrooge justifying his lack of charity and hard-heartedness towards his fellow man. He argues, from an essentially Social Darwinist point of view, that the prisons and workhouses are sufficient for the poor, and that anything more encourages them to breed and contributes to the excess population. Scrooge is an honest miser.

Scrooge can be contrasted with another Dickens character, Mrs. Jellyby from Bleak House (the BBC’s 2005 Andrew Davies adaptation featuring Gillian Anderson may be the best period drama ever filmed). Unlike Scrooge, Mrs. Jellyby is eager to demonstrate her charitable fervor as she supports and promotes charitable work in Africa while ignoring her own family and the poor of London. If you’ve been around churches much, you know the type.

Both Scrooge and Jellyby rationalize away natural charity, one callous and the other hypocritical. While I can dismiss Mrs. Jellyby as ridiculous, I must answer Scrooge’s seemingly honest protest. The errors he makes in twisting certain truths help reveal challenges with doing charity well.

Charity & Moral Hazard

The danger of misinformed charity, which Scrooge dismisses as all charity, is that of moral hazard. We get more of what we subsidize. It is undeniable that many are incredibly naive to the second-order effects of misplaced charity. The drive to help others begins, in our hearts, as a sort of pain, an empathy at seeing a fellow human being in apparent distress. While Scrooge and Mrs. Jellyby utilize rationalizations to suppress their natural empathy, others make the opposite error and let empathy be their sole guide to giving. Particularly in the evangelical world, it is seen as spiritually deficient to allow the rational mind any veto over the heart’s impulses, commonly misinterpreted in an impoverished theology as the very voice of God.

Effective charity that does not harm, especially in the modern era of abundance, is very hard. Since almost anyone who is willing to work, and due to government transfer payments, many who aren’t willing to work, can easily buy the necessities of life, anyone who lacks these things usually has some deeper problem that is enabled by an immediate act of charity.

Most of the homeless, for example, are drug addicts who refuse treatment and refuse work if offered. In feeding them, we enable their lifestyle and their continuing to play Russian roulette with their next fentanyl-laced drug binge. By helping the drug-addicted homeless, we make life more difficult for the working poor, who often must buy or rent homes on the “bad side” of town where the homeless congregate, and are the primary victims of their theft and vagrancy. It’s working poor people whose kids can’t play outside in safety because our cities and churches enable homeless encampments. Further, as a husband and father of daughters, the presence of homeless, crazy people significantly affects my women’s quality of life and safety as they attempt to go about their lawful and peaceful business around town.

So what principle would enable discernment between Scrooge’s position and unregulated charity? I believe we must revive the concept of the “worthy poor.” Charity is best directed at those who have done the right thing but have had bad luck going about it. It’s recognizing the truth of the famous Social Darwinist essay “The Forgotten Man,” that charity always has a cost external to the giver; money and goods do not come into being ex nihilo.

Now you know that "the poor and the weak" are continually put forward as objects of public interest and public obligation. In the appeals which are made, the terms "the poor" and "the weak" are used as if they were terms of exact definition. Except the pauper, that is to say, the man who cannot earn his living or pay his way, there is no possible definition of a poor man. Except a man who is incapacitated by vice or by physical infirmity, there is no definition of a weak man. The paupers and the physically incapacitated are an inevitable charge on society. About them no more need be said. But the weak who constantly arouse the pity of humanitarians and philanthropists are the shiftless, the imprudent, the negligent, the impractical, and the inefficient, or they are the idle, the intemperate, the extravagant, and the vicious. Now the troubles of these persons are constantly forced upon public attention, as if they and their interests deserved especial consideration, and a great portion of all organized and unorganized effort for the common welfare consists in attempts to relieve these classes of people. I do not wish to be understood now as saying that nothing ought to be done for these people by those who are stronger and wiser. That is not my point. What I want to do is to point out the thing which is overlooked and the error which is made ill all these charitable efforts. The notion is accepted as if it were not open to any question that if you help the inefficient and vicious you may gain something for society or you may not, but that you lose nothing. This is a complete mistake. Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else. I would spend any conceivable amount of zeal and eloquence if I possessed it to try to make people grasp this idea. Capital is force. If it goes one way it cannot go another. If you give a loaf to a pauper you cannot give the same loaf to a laborer. Now this other man who would have got it but for the charitable sentiment which bestowed it on a worthless member of society is the Forgotten Man. The philanthropists and humanitarians have their minds all full of the wretched and miserable whose case appeals to compassion, attacks the sympathies, takes possession of the imagination, and excites the emotions. They push on towards the quickest and easiest remedies and they forget the real victim.

Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, ready to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfill it, with respect on both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer. But we stand with our backs to the independent and productive laborer all the time.

Every dollar we donate, anything we buy for someone else, represents a claim on a finite pool of goods and labor, and at the margin, makes those goods more expensive for the working poor. This is not theoretical, as a recent study showed that expanding food stamps resulted in a 15% inflation in food prices.

Charity As Social Insurance

A middle position I take is that proper charity serves as a form of social insurance for those who, through no fault of their own, fall upon bad luck. Those blessed with good luck have an obligation to find and ameliorate the situations of their brethren with bad luck, but only to the extent a) these situations are within their natural circle of influence, with greater obligations the closer the natural relationship, b) in prudent proportion to their own obligations to provide for their own families, both now and in the future*, and c) where they can have reasonable confidence they are not creating moral hazard or dependence. Perhaps the ideal situation is a working family with unexpected medical bills that make their honest day’s wage inadequate for their family’s needs — coincidentally, the exact situation we see featured in A Christmas Carol!

* The Biblical guideline of 10% of income, or arguably 13% if we average together the various recurring tithes, for total annual giving seems a reasonable balance between these factors¹.

Scrooge’s error, then, is to conflate bad charity with good, and refuse to see the presence of the worthy poor in his immediate vicinity, indeed in his own employee, Bob Cratchit. This is the unifying theme we see in Dickens’ works, the call for us to see the worthy poor in front of us, and help those whose good morals but bad fortune render them worthy of aid.

Practical Applications

One of the underappreciated benefits of the 2017 tax cuts is the expansion of the standard deduction to where most families don't need to worry about tax deductibility. If your total giving is under the standard deduction limit, it doesn't matter whether it's tax-deductible or not.

This opens up the avenue of direct charity. Instead of being an NPC responding to organized charities' marketing campaigns and massive overhead costs, identify someone needy in your community and just help them directly. Over the years, more and more of my giving has been direct because I see the needs with my own eyes, and can fact-check situations directly, instead of delegating that to a fundraising operation. We've set up nonprofits to facilitate this, because the existing ones, even most churches, are run bureaucratically and aren't equipped to deal quickly and efficiently with acute needs like someone needing a car repair or help with medical bills. But again, if you're under the standard deduction, none of this matters, you can just give money directly with no tax consequence.

The neediest often aren't who we think. After adjusting for government benefits, the neediest people in our society are typically married couples with kids where Dad works an entry-level job and Mom is the caregiver, making between $30,000 and $60,000 per year. People in this income range generally can't qualify for government benefits that are worth more (after tax) than they earn at their jobs. So buy some Walmart gift cards and start slipping them into diaper bags the next time you see a harried young mom in a banged-up old minivan.

I think Dickens would rather disapprove of the way we typically obscure charity today. One of the downsides of the bureaucratization of charity is the harm to the giver, beyond the mere waste of fundraising and payroll expenses of the charity. Dickens seems to prescribe, as medicine for the soul, that the giver ought to directly know the recipient. It is in this exchange, where we see with our own eyes the beneficiaries of our ceded abundance, and the recipients are filled with hope that their situations have been personally seen and empathized with practically, that we are enriched beyond the value of the gift.

And with that, I wish all of my readers a very Merry Christmas!

1. The standard interpretation according to Jewish tradition is that the “first tithe” was annual and was given to the Levites who further tithed to the priests. The “second tithe” was also annual but was a tithe related to feasting at the temple, in that the tithers were also the consumers of the tithe. The “poor tithe” was levied in the third and sixth year of the seven year Hebrew agricultural cycle. The second tithe is difficult to interpret as to its applicability today (esp. given the relative size of the agricultural economy today), but I generally see it as reflecting God's sanction of “wasteful” displays of Christian hospitality, whether that be weddings, parties, social events, etc. We should have an “open hand” and dedicate a some of our income and time to hospitality. If we add the first tithe (10%) and then multiply the poor tithe by 2/7 (as it was only levied twice per seven year cycle), we come up with an overall average of 12.9%, which I round to 13%. Also note that this implies that 22% of our total tithing should go to the poor directly!