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Canadian Scientists Protest Political Sandbagging of Evidence-Based Policy
New submitter sandbagger writes "Stephen Harper and the Canadian government have made headlines several times for stifling opinions that dissent with their own. This also applies to respected, peer-reviewed science. Canadian scientists have chafed at being gagged and having evidence take a back seat when forming policy, so they're grabbing their slide rules and marching in protest. 'Hundreds of participants gathered in 17 cities for rallies on Monday. In Toronto some donned lab coats while in Vancouver protesters were seen wearing gags adorned with the Conservative Party logo – a reference to the alleged muzzling of federal scientists by political overseers. ... Dr. Gibbs and colleagues said they hoped the rallies would alert the public to scientists’ concerns that the federal government has shifted funding markedly toward commercially driven research at the expense of public-interest science. ... Dr. Gibbs said her group would consult with the Canadian research community and look to other countries in trying to craft recommended policies for science in government. In recent years explicit scientific integrity rules have been adopted by many U.S. federal departments and agencies, after accusations of censorship and politicization of science during the administration of former president George W. Bush. 'Canadian scientists are where American scientists were maybe a decade ago,' said Michael Halpern, a Washington, D.C.-based program manager with the Union of Concerned Scientists. 'They're trying to figure out how to protect themselves from a government that’s increasingly focused on message control over a more open discussion of the facts.'"
Don't they have corporations in Canadia to tell the scientists how the studies should turn out?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is Canada, they use a chicken cannon.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
what is this muzzled science? Why isn't that obvious let alone seemingly never mentioned.
getting the word out in this day and age isn't exactly the problem it was 20 years ago.
god knows I'm not sticking up for that cretin harper, but seriously, what's the deal?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Here in Australia the Minister for science role has been scraped, effectively removing scientific opinion from the decision making process.
Not really. What's happening is exactly what happened in Australia, the UK and the USA. That is the Murdoch empire has been blasting the populace with carefully orchestrated propaganda designed to shift the political spectrum "right" and get poor people to vote against their own interests.
It will never cease to amaze me how pathetically effective this type of targeted propaganda is at actively getting people to do things that are not in their own interest.
The Canadian shift has taken the longest to occur, part of that is because it took Murdoch longer to penetrate and take over enough of the Canadian media because Canada still has ownership rules (at least until the propaganda machine gets those revoked as an affront to capitalism like they did in the US). Inevitably the Canadian people will fall to the far right just like everyone else under the sway of the Murdoch propaganda machine.
Harper seems to have erased your links. The bastard.
It oughtn't be surprising: those least informed are most easily persuaded. If you went and told an englishman circa 1600 about science killing millions (a la hiroshima), but left out the part about it saving millions more (medicine, etc), they would be persuaded because they'd be presented with only part of the truth.
Hate to break the bad news to you, but people who vote to have their own rights taken away in the name of "security" probably didn't deserve to be making their own choices in the first place.
Incidentally, if you actually, sincerely believe that the current ball of shit that is world politics is entirely due to Rupert Murdoch, you're either mentally ill or trolling. The man is a speck, a drop in the ocean compared to some of the money moving in defense contract circles. Murdoch is just a rich fuck who's making himself richer parroting what the people with REAL power are saying, ingratiating himself to the royalty. Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking. The politicians you elected are the ones doing that plotting. Even if he were, again, not important enough to make a difference. He's a media mogul, nothing more. I'm sure if the Democrats threw more money at him he'd dance just as well for the opposite side. The know nothings that Americans elect are the problem, not their media whores.
The one plotting to take away your freedom is your president, worry about that and forget Murdoch, you might actually accomplish something. Unless the extent of your activism involves schizophrenic rants about Rupert Murdoch being some sort of conservative Voodoo shaman?
Mostly because they use the NSA spy program to identify the ACs and send the mounties to snowboard them.
(caveat - they don't waterboard except in summer)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Please, nobody is better at ignoring hard evidence than the left. Bad as all politicians are, right wing ones are still a lot less scaring than our new overlords from the left.
Really?
The right wing ones tell us that spending money to fix underlying social problems isn't as effective as prisons so we have huge expenditures on prisons and huge social problems. Yet in countries which spend money on fixing the social problems they have fewer people in prison.
Right wing politicians tell us that as long as a company is making profit it must be good, even if the banks are taking us to the cleaners.
Right wing politicians try to tell us what we can do with our bodies (eg abortion) because God told them so, and so therefore they must be right.
Right wing politicians have classified pot as a narcotic and make all sorts of claims about how dangerous and addictive it is without any evidence whatsoever other than their fervent belief in that.
Right wing governments will tell you abandoning safety and environmental regulations will actually make us safer and have a cleaner environment as if some magic will happen.
Right wing politicians tell us that tax cuts for the rich will somehow magically improve the rest of our lives when in fact there's no evidence for that.
Right wing governments will tell you all sorts of crap, specifically because it's in line with what they believe, but seldom because it's something they can prove.
Sorry, but you're an idiot if you believe that right wing politicians don't ignore evidence. The lies a right wing government tells you are just a different set of lies than what a left wing government tells you.
Which is why policy based on actual evidence is a much better choice.
Show me the proof, not what your ideology (left or right) has told you must be Immutable Truth.
If there's no evidence to support your claims, and the things you said were supposed to fix things aren't working -- then clearly what they've been claiming isn't based in facts or reality. Merely ideology and what they want the world to behave like.
Which is exactly what we see these days.
yes everyone let's ignore Murdoch and focus on the REAL threat, anyone who isn't a republican!
One thing to keep in mind is that government scientists are pretty much in the same position as scientists who work in industry: they are there to serve the interests of their employer.
In the case of government scientists, their role is to conduct research that relates to policy or to support the civil service. For example: environmental scientists may be conducting research into acceptable harvest levels for fisheries or how to manage land in a flood plain. It is unfortunate when a government distorts that research to support their policies rather than using the research to inform policy, but that shouldn't be unexpected.
More concerning is the cutbacks to academic research, which has been more independent in the past. Academic scientists have not, traditionally, been tied to the interests of government so they have had much more leeway to express their results independent of external pressure.
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago. Clinton deregulated the banks. Funny how you forget all of that.
Since fucking WHEN is Obama and Clinton left wing?????
You woldnt know a left leaning politcian if it bit you on the ass
If you are referring to Obama and the democrats as being on the left side of the political spectrum then you are grossly mistaken. The democrats are more like center-right...it's just that you don't see it like that in your duality "democracy". Being non-American and an outside observer, this is very evident.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
See, for example "Nix V. Hedden" (1893 wherein the US government declared tomatoes to be a vegetable, for the convenience of collecting taxes, even though those pesky scientists said it was a fruit.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago.
The $700 billion bailout through TARP was authorized by Bush, not Obama. (While the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, it was not a purely Democratic measure. In both houses, it received the support of the majority of congresscritters from both parties, and indeed needed support from both sides of the aisle to pass.)
Clinton deregulated the banks.
Well...
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB) repealing part of Glass-Steagall was passed while Clinton was president, certainly. Of course, the original bill was introduced in both House and Senate by Republicans - who controlled both houses at the time - and supported by a majority of mostly-Republicans in the House, and exclusively by Republicans in the Senate. The final bill produced by the conference committee was passed by veto-proof margins in both House and Senate; Clinton couldn't actually have stopped it.
Left unsaid in your comment is the implicit suggestion that the subprime mortgage crisis was precipitated by GLB, or that GLB made the crisis worse. While GLB has a number of flaws - and I would not say that it represented good public policy - it is debatable whether or not the subprime mortgage crisis can fairly be laid at its feet. There are credible arguments made that even prior to GLB's deregulation there was nothing in law that prevented investment banks from merging, from investing in the risky instruments that helped precipitate the crisis, or from keeping their books in the ways they did to conceal the problem until everything came crashing down. Some respectable individuals have even whispered that GLB may have slightly softened the impact, as banks that merged investment and depository institutions actually performed better during the crisis than investment-only firms.
Funny how you forget all of that.
Funny the...interesting...way you choose to remember all of that.
~Idarubicin
Nobody needs to be radical to follow a doctrine. Obama, Clinton and Democrats in general are politically aligned to the left. They defend increasing control over the Economy, the Welfare State, Affirmative Action and many other ideas that practically define what is called political "left".
This started way before the GLB. It started decades ago with government interference in real estate contracts and financing. Thomas Sowell explains the process in detail in his book "The Housing Boom and Bust", which I highly recommend if you really want to understand what happened.
Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking.
It's true his power is not absolute.
Even in Australia (where his control of the print amounts to almost 77% of papers sold) he has, since he backed Whitlam in1972, lost the federal election on 3 occasions (1973, 1993 and 2010). He only missed 2010 by a hair's breath (his influence did not extend to those independents who decided which party to back in the hung parliament). That's a success rate of well below 100% (it's actually only a touch above 80%). And yes, in Australia, Murdoch backs either side of politics as the expediencies of current business imperatives demand. Though in the US (where his power is much diluted) his media seem welded on to the Republican side.
In Australia, of course, he has just notched up another win, in an election that (given the (re)emergence of a popular figure on the non-Murdoch just before the election) was being touted as almost a test of his power to determine the government of Australia. In the event Rudd ran a pretty lousy campaign so the precipitous fall in his popularity cannot entirely be attributed to Murdoch's admittedly shameless propaganda: among other things dressing the incumbent and his deputy in Nazi uniforms (actually Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schulz) on the front covers of Australia's highest circulation dailies.
OTOH, it would be foolish simply to ignore Murdoch's influence. And I would stress to that the use of 'Murdoch' here is somewhat of a synedoche, it being perhaps more accurate to speak of the influence of the upper management of News Ltd in general --including of course Col Allan, whom Murdoch sent in specifically to fight the 2013 federal election.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The only people shrugging are the worthless executives who take credit for Atlas's hard work.
I'm a leftist. I'm upper middle class, and I believe that my taxes ought to be higher so as to help people who need it. I also believe your taxes should be higher in order to help people who need it. The world isn't so simple that we can just lump all poor people into one label (that is, "lazy") and say that they, as a group, deserve to starve and die. That is immoral. It is far more immoral than raising the income tax on the wealthy by a few percent.
I'm a leftist. I am aware of the fact that corporate profits are up while wages are down. I don't believe that people should live off of the government; I just wonder where all those jobs are now that the "job creators" are doing so well.
I'm a leftist. I am aware of the fact that the reason abortion was made legal in the first place was because people did it anyway, and many many people died from it. I also think it's funny as hell that you're this big conservative yet you expect young people to take care of your selfish ass in your old age. Save up some money like a good fucking responsible self-sufficient capitalist and pay those immigrants to take care of you, dipshit.
I'm a leftist. I'm no expert on climate change, but I know that people who study the climate for a living are more reliable sources on climate change than people who really really want climate change not to be true. That said, like every other leftist, I hope we are wrong about climate change, because if we're right about it, we're all fucked. Also, unlike with climate change, there's a lot of actual scientific debate on the merits of pot.
I'm a leftist. My car gets 45 miles to the gallon, and I'm in favor of pushing for stronger efficiency and emissions standards rather than stopping them. Every leftist in the world could shiver in the dark, but that wouldn't solve our emissions problem. Change needs to happen on a global scale, or we're fucked.
I'm a leftist, and I don't even know where the fuck to go with this one. We gave the rich their money? Are you fucking high? We want to tax it all back? Are you really, really fucking high? Fuck, I'd settle for having the investor class taxed at the same rate I am rather than at 15 percent.
I'm a leftist, and I understand that science starts out wrong about a lot of things, but when their observations don't fit their hypotheses, they refine their conclusions to fit the data rather than dogmatically repeating the same claims over and over again in the face of overwhelming evidence the way conservative economists do. You don't like science?
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science." - Carl Sagan
Yeah it def happens in australia. When John Howard was in, my sister worked in climate research, and the government was regularly threatening researchers that if their research kept demonstrating potential hazards from climate change funding could be pulled or worse. She was pretty much told "The official government line is climate change is not real, and if you scientists dont start conforming we'll pull your funding". When the press started getting involved and her collegues started recieving death threats from crazed climate denialists (Apparently science is some sort of "communist plot") she left the country to go work in the UK.
Similar things happened to a friend of the family in the 1980s who was researching the effects of forestry on the water table, and after a report he wrote warning that the water table was getting salty due to logging in the Karri forests, his report was officially censured and he was ordered not to tell anyone. He also resigned.
Incidently this is why I sometimes want to slap assholes who claim climate scientists are doctoring reports for grants. Nothing could be further from the reality. Scientists in Australia, the US, and UK all report recieving threats from politicians that if they dont "tone down" the reports they could lose funding. As a result I believe the situation we are in, and this is a belief privately held by many researchers, is a lot worse than the official models show.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Exactly. Less eloquently worded: Calling Democrats left shows a serious lack of historical and international perspective.
First, economics is not a real science, it is social science, and, in its prediction craft, often similar to astrology.
Second, as you could see at the example of West Germany, social market economy was far better than fundamentalist capitalism to improve the lives of common people.
And above all, saying that there never was such thing as collective, is sheer idiocy because human society evolved in small collectives, not as a bunch of individuals. All this "special snowflake" individuality is a very recent invention and seems to breed arrogant arseholes first and foremost.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If you actually read the parent post yo would see that he was not espousing leftist ideas, he was simply criticising right wing ones.
You are so wrapped up in your blind adherance to ideology that you cannot apparently see that both wings are stupid in so many ways. You are instead merely attacking the left to apparently defend the right. Both are blindly ideological and you are following the blind. Well done.
Now, to play the game...
(And just to note because I'm criticising your precious ideals, I am sure you will assume I'm a commie or something. Rest assured, I will flouridate your precious bodily fluid.)
Leftists defend state control over the economy regardless of the fact that it has been proven, by the economic calculation problem that it is simply impossible for centralized control to work. .
Ah well done. Pushing the left to communism and the right to anarchy, and then declaring by fiat that communism is better. You know, both sides want some degree of central control over the economy, even the batshit rightwing tea partiers.
Leftists defend political and economical models that have been empirically shown time and time again ineffective and unsustainable at their best and catastrophic at their worse, but who cares about those last dozen tries or so, THIS time it will work, right?
Like trickle down economics? Fact: both wings do this. Stop being blinded by ideology.
Leftists ignore that there isn't any other economical system that got even near Capitalism in improving the lives of common people.
Again, left is not the same as communism. Communism is easy to pick holes in. Sadly, capitalistic socialist democracies such as those which exist in much of Europe illustrate the ignornace of your statement.
Leftists blatantly ignore that all countries that have the freest economies have consistently improved the quality of live of the normal citizens, while those that have tried leftists "solutions" are either broken or breaking at this point.
Like... Sweden? Norway, Finland? Those famously right wing places.
And above all leftists defend that the collective know what is best for the individual when all examples in human history show that there is no such thing as "collective". There is only people ready to make use of class warfare, bigotry and naivete to gain power and live the lives of kings while the very people they pretend to care about die from hunger
Ah, again with assuming left==communism. You know the straw man completely false scotsman right assumes the invisible hand will fix everything. You know there IS NO HAND, right?
Right wing ideas are not the "Immutable Truth" even because this concept is utopic. They are wrong many many times, but they are right at least part of the time. Left wing ideas on the other hand, are all based on lies that come directly from the core of its doctrine and as such are the "Immutable Farce".
Ah I see, so right wing doctrine is not bad because you say so but left is because you say so. Got it.
Leftists are above and beyond anything else a bunch of self-serving hypocrites.
And if you're anything to go by, right wingers are a bunch if ignorant loonies. Fortunately, I know this not to be the case in general.
Though I'd put anyone who self-identifies with either wing as an ignorant loonie of sorts.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
He is destroying Canada for the sake of his Jewish masters. Mass immigration is genocide, plain and simple. Whatever is good for the Jews, is all that matters to these worthless parasites. Who prints all the money out of thin air? Why, it's the JEWS. And thus, the corrupt politicians do whatever the Jews tell them, including genociding their own people by FORCING them to accept millions of non-white INVADERS into their country. What's not to like?
Quick, better mod me down, can't have a factual discussion on Slashdot can we?
WHOO UP THERE!! I mod you up for being FUNNIER THAN HELL! Sounds like you are wearing a pointed white hat while you watch fox news. Either that or you live somewhere in the BUSH with all sorts of toys like ak 47s and the like. If you actually believe the crap you just wrote then I suggest you had better get a vasectomy because any off spring you might conceive deserve better.
But this is a discussion about how a government that essentially controls Canadian research is deliberately trying to edit the results of their research. This is the very same government who has let individuals take huge amounts of the economy off shore and has privatized many things in the name of free enterprise. The same said government has to a great extent devalued labour to such an extent with policies like allowing the wholesale export of natural resources at fire sale prices instead of investing in industry through materials science. The very method that made our country great and a world leader in things like the forest industry.
Funny but it has gotten so bad that the individuals that have essentially raped the economy of this great country have created a counties of their own. Much the same as the Mafia did with Cuba in the 1950's. It is a group of offshore islands called the Cayman Islands where many companies and individuals have to only have a small office to deposit obscenely huge amounts of cash in the banks. In fact in these off shore tax havens in the Caribbean have the largest gold reserves in the world held in the name of the individuals who have raped Canada and elsewhere. This has been going on unabated since the founders of the offshore tax havens, the friends of ex-prime minister Brian the First established Canadian Banks off shore in their little tax haven fiefdoms. My suggestion is that Canada should invade Belize and the Cayman Islands the same way Regan invaded a little island once upon a time. It might even bring Canada and the US out of the recession!
What a load of unmitigated rubbish. Not much of a surprise it's been given a +5 here at Slashdot.
"Laws" in politics are normative. People can be rational or irrational and politicians are no different. Scientists can be correct or incorrect. Sometimes the effects they claim decline over time. Sometimes they're just plain wrong, and sometimes the political consequences of doing what they say is impossible for the electorate to accept. Only in Plato's Republic would you want scientists dictating policy.
The battle between Liberal Capitalism and Marxism is over, in case you weren't aware. Liberal Capitalism won. You Trots failed to feed and clothe your people. You kept hold of power by repression of freedoms. You lost the ideological battle, please get the fuck over it. Collectivism no longer has a viable economic theory. Come back to Slashdot and post an article when you've thought one up.
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
What I find fascinating about conservatives is that a large portion of them does not only chooses to be ignorant, they revel in being ignorant and declaring war on science. Conservative pundits can say what they want, pull out all the old slogans and call dissenting voices 'communists' and 'socialists' but even the old Soviet Union did not revel in ignorance. The communists did many things wrong but they at least they saw some value in scientific research and managed to turn Russia from a medieval kingdom into a modern technologically advanced country.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Let's talk about the ACTUAL Threat, the Bipartisan "Keep Our Spoiled Butts in Power" party. The longer a pol is in office, the more bought-off he or she gets. . .
The answer, of course, is hard and enforced term limits, so that politicians can only get captured by the system only somewhat, before it kicks them out. . .
Hate to break the bad news to you, but people who vote to have their own rights taken away in the name of "security" probably didn't deserve to be making their own choices in the first place.
Incidentally, if you actually, sincerely believe that the current ball of shit that is world politics is entirely due to Rupert Murdoch, you're either mentally ill or trolling. The man is a speck, a drop in the ocean compared to some of the money moving in defense contract circles. Murdoch is just a rich fuck who's making himself richer parroting what the people with REAL power are saying, ingratiating himself to the royalty. Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking. The politicians you elected are the ones doing that plotting. Even if he were, again, not important enough to make a difference. He's a media mogul, nothing more. I'm sure if the Democrats threw more money at him he'd dance just as well for the opposite side. The know nothings that Americans elect are the problem, not their media whores.
The one plotting to take away your freedom is your president, worry about that and forget Murdoch, you might actually accomplish something. Unless the extent of your activism involves schizophrenic rants about Rupert Murdoch being some sort of conservative Voodoo shaman?
While I agree that the state of world politics is not due solely to Rupert Murdoch, I disagree that he is merely a speck. He controls quite a bit of media around the world. I hope we can all understand by now that when you can control what news and viewpoints people hear you can control what and how they think. Of course there are other news outlets, but in the US those are owned and controlled by a handful of corporations (five, I think). The operators of these corporations share certain interests and so will not allow much talk about certain subjects or viewpoints.
Murdoch is more than a speck; he is a master propagandist that has a heavy hand in how many people see the world. It's hard to overstate that kind of power. He serves a valuable purpose as a member of the Elite.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I understand that in Europe they define those terms differently, since almost everyone there accepts the idea that the solution to problems is greater government power and the only question remaining is how that power is exercised.
Nope,
Right-wing = defense of entrenched priviledge.
Left-wing = liberty, equality, brotherhood. (and sisterhood too, of course).
Government is a means, not an end.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
You Trots failed to feed and clothe your people
Where have Trots been in government since Lev Davidovich moved to Mexico?
(Answer - the USA, lots of the early neo-cons were ex Trots).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
He said his and yours. In a democracy we all have to play by the same rules; that's basic fairness. Fairness is nothing to do with whether you agree with them or not. In a democracy, there will always be laws that somebody doesn't agree with, and everybody will find some of its laws disagreeable. Grow up and live with that, or fuck off to Somalia.
Sports analogy: A football coach may think field goals are overvalued, and that the game would be improved if they were only 2 points. He may actively campaign for the rules to be changed and go on about it endlessly in post-match interviews. In the meantime, does he order his team to intentionally miss one out of three?
It's not inconsistent at all to play within the rules as they are while wishing they were different.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's interesting. The people who bitch the most about affirmative action are the same people who feel very very strongly that discrimination by private companies should be legal. Here's a thought: make discrimination illegal, and then maybe we can talk about getting rid of affirmative action.
Discrimination kind of throws the whole "personal responsibility" thing right out the window, doesn't it? Hey, look at me! I was born white and wealthy, but I got where I am with hard work. If other people worked as hard as I do, they'd be right where I am. The fact that it's harder for minorities to get jobs even when they have the same qualifications doesn't enter into it, right?
I believe in personal responsibility. We have a personal responsibility not only to take care of ourselves if we're lucky enough to be able to do so, but also to take care of others who are not. Again, it's time we started admitting that this warped view people have of the phrase "personal responsibility" where it means "take care of me, and fuck everyone else" is a serious moral issue with American society.
Actual statistics contradict your bogus claims about abortion deaths.
I get to state my own argument. You don't get to make it for me. Much like I said above, how one person happens to allocate their funds means precisely jack. What I am saying is that this is everyone's responsibility. That includes yours and mine, but it is not, as you imply, limited to you and me.
Also, while we're making assumptions about how other people use their money, I assume that, since you seen to believe so much in private charity, you donate a significant portion of your money to charity in order to help people in need? What portion? Who knows, really. It's just like arbitrarily saying that because I take tax deductions, I'm a hypocrite.
When taxes on the wealthy go down and assistance programs are cut, charitable donations never go up enough to make up the difference, so honestly, your whole point is complete bullshit, even on the off chance that you do donate a significant portion of your money to charity as you imply. Yes, I believe that tax funded government assistance programs are more effective than private ones, precisely because they have an adequate budget to make a difference.