Happy Boxing Day!

This holiday (celebrated in many parts of the world) has its origins in Britain of the 1800s, during the time of Queen Victoria. From the above link:

Boxing Day got its name when Queen Victoria was on the throne in the 1800s, when the rich used to box up gifts to give to the poor.

Churches also played a part in the creation of Boxing Day. Through the year they would take money from churchgoers in the form of a collection, and hand it out at Christmas.

Many of them stored the collection money in a box, which they opened on Christmas Day. The money was then handed out to the poor the next day, on Boxing Day.

Now those boxes aren't as popular. However some people leave out extra money for people like binmen or milkmen in the weeks before Christmas, and call it a Christmas box.

There is something to be said for doing something about the poor and needy yourself. In modern Western countries charity has mostly been turned over to the government. From the New Deal to the Great Society Americans nave been content to let government take the lead on halping the less fortunate.

Not surprisingly, the results have been disastrous. In the midst of what the media describes as a "growing" economy, more than 43 million people now receive food stamps - a 14.2% increase over last year. Not surprisingly, the percentage of workers participating in the labor force declined to 63.6% in November - a level not seen since the early 1980s, or almost a third of a century. If the secular media considers this a recovery, I would sure hate to see what they think constitutes a recession! The record deficits that the US has run over the last four years do not seemed to have helped much.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this whole mess is the fact that the so-called War on Poverty has been the creation of a massive (and hideously expensive) bureaucracy to fight this war. By any rational measure we have decisively lost the War on Poverty, yet much of the media and the academic community wants to spend even more money on this quagmire.

It is a sad fact that many Christians helped to start this War on Poverty, and still insist on fighting it even though the human cost of this failure has been enormous. They also believe that lobbying government officials for more taxpayer money for this-or-that pork barrel project is an acceptable substitute for rolling up their sleeves and actually helping the poor.

This Boxing Day, I urge Christians to lay aside the notion that charity can be outsourced to someone else.