What's Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment Review

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What's Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment ReviewI owe Roger Kimball a lot for his "discovery" of the late Australian philosopher David Stove. Stove is very definitely a man in near-total disagreement with the "received ideas" of his time.
In other essays, Stove makes intelligent attacks on Darwinian evolution and the equality of women, if you can imagine such things! (!! Even "worse," reading those essays may make you wonder whether he is actually right.)
In this book, Stove takes on the unquestioned virtue of benevolence, and by the time he is done with it, it is a pathetic, pretentious thing with its clothes in tatters, desperately needing something to cover its ugly core --- which is, of course, our inborn need to feel good about ourselves. (I mean, who really cares about the poor? And, really, what is to be done about the poor? Writing a check to the government relieves so many anxieties!)
But Stove goes back to Malthus (and makes me really want to read Malthus, but not the first edition) and basically makes the economic argument of "you get what you pay for." Beginning with the English Poor Laws, the wonders of benevolence went like this: a certain fragment of the population was deemed worthy of subsidy, and so (of course) others were taxed to pay for that subsidy. Those "others" included people who were very near poverty, and the additional taxes actually forced them into poverty. As a result, with the coming of the new year, there were (amazingly) MORE poor people, rather than less.
I can't summarize the book here, of course, but I would suggest reading it with another book which lefties really hate, Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition. Murray provides the data for the failure of welfare in America, while Stove provides (along with Malthus) the philosophical explanation.
Be aware, though: when Stove discusses "human psychology," he is likely to sum it up as follows: (1) everyone has a hunger instinct (b) almost everyone has a sexual instinct (c) the vast majority of human beings have a huge endowment of laziness, and (d) no shortage anywhere of selfishness, stupidity, and short-sightedness. I suspect this disqualifies him as a "feel-good writer."
Have we learned anything from the collapse of the USSR, and the shocking revelation that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the others produced well over a hundred million corpses in the name of "benevolence?"
I don't know. Have we?
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By the way, for an update on the state of benevolence in Britain, see Theodore Dalrymple's article in the City Journal (8/11/11), "British Degeneracy on Parade."
"But of all the examples of benevolence causing misery, easily the most important is twentieth-century communism. This is an evil so appalling that some ignorant or superstitious people believe that its psychological roots can only lie in Satanism, or even in Satan himself. But in sober fact it is quite certain that the psychological root of communism is benevolence. Lenin, Stalin, and the rest would not have done what they did, but for the fact that they were determined to bring about the future happiness of the human race."What's Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment Overview

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