What about the Poor?

Through this entry in Acton's PowerBlog, I found this entry in Craig Carter's The Politics of the Cross Resurrected blog, which is a response to this entry in Jim Wallis' God's Politics blog. Isn't that beautiful?

The most interesting/debatable part of Wallis' and Carter's disagreements is the issue of whether, if we got rid of Gov.'s redistributive tax policies, private charity would be enough:

Wallis: To anticipate the Libertarian response, let me just say that private charity is simply not enough to satisfy the demands of either fairness or justice, let alone compassion.

Carter: Private charity is the foundation of the Western world and more effective, far less corrupt and much more compassionate than government welfare checks.

Carter goes on to say that private charity "clearly can" "deal with absolute poverty".

Now my question is, what if it can't?, or, what if it doesn't?

Anchored in Reason

..is the title of this blog I recently discovered through what was basically the best task ever: to rank a top 20 list of blogs from a given list of 60 personal websites of applicants to Acton's summer university.

This one stood out because of its classy design and because its author is an eloquent college student with interesting opinions. It's the kind of blog with an entry about the iPad as well as an entry explaining a logical argument for the existence of God.

He also wrote an article on education with this infuriating line: However, under no circumstances should everyone in a society be educated. Knowledge is very easily misused by those of ill will or misunderstood with dire consequences by those incapable of fully grasping advanced concepts.

So, I commented on that, and he replied, and I replied again.