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?

If private charity failed to result in food/shelter/medical care for all, then should the onlooking compassionate citizen still disapprove of "coercive charity" on moral grounds?

I don't know the answer. But in his article titled "Libertarianism and Welfare: Is Private Charity Enough?", Richard Garner concludes that we don't even need to worry about that difficult moral question because private charity definitively would be enough - more than enough, he says:

To Sum Up
So, the fact that so many people who are not themselves net beneficiaries or employees of the welfare state continue to vote for or support welfare statist policies itself indicates a good chance that huge numbers of people would continue to donate money were the compulsion removed.
On a conservative estimate I said that a third of the present government expenditure could be raised through voluntary donations. I then suggested that, conservatively, half of the total revenue spent by the government on welfare is collected by those that can support themselves and would be denied support by private charities. That means doubling the remaining funds for anybody left. That gives us two thirds of the present expenditures.
Lastly we have the superior efficiency of charity over government, averaging twice as efficient. So we can double our two thirds of government expenditure. The result is that leaving support for the needy to charity could end up with 33% more support, in financial terms, for the actual needy than is presently provided by the state.
Is charity enough? It is more than enough!

I want to believe him, that's all I can say.