Cold-hearted conservatism

“I completely understand your viewpoints. I just think they’re cold-hearted,” a professor of mine once told me. Another time, when explaining my views on the proper role of government to a classmate, I was asked, “Don’t you have a heart?”
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about conservatism, and the one that annoys me the most.

I spent the four months before I came to college in a rural village 18 hours by bus from the capital city of Ghana. I had some sort of idea that working with the poor in Africa would change my life forever and that I would want to dedicate myself to the cause.
My time in Ghana certainly changed me, but not in the way I expected. I anticipated that my interactions with poverty would make me more progressive in terms of my economic views. In turns out that the exact opposite happened.

The first night I was in the village, I was told by the orphanage “director” that the orphanage would run out of food in less than a week. I use the word director in quotations because he did not actually live with the kids. No one did. There was no staff to take care of them, only an old woman who lived in a nearby hut who helped the children cook when there was enough food.

The heartache I felt about the orphanage’s conditions caused me physical pain. My stomach hurt and my chest felt tight as I went to bed in my room with walls made from mud. Two days later, I hitchhiked an hour to the nearest town with Internet. I wrote to my parents:

“I think this puts me in a bit of a tough position, because obviously I can’t let them starve, but there is no way I can finance food for more than a month or six weeks (80 children!),” I wrote. “Also, I don’t know if it is good for them to be dependent on me, as I am only staying for a few months, or if this is really what I came here to do.”

“Obviously” I could not let the children starve, given that the options were: 1. Watch them starve, 2. Leave and still know that they were starving, or 3. Not let them starve. Even before I was a Republican, I was a proponent of teaching a man to fish. However, I had no idea how to speak the local language, let alone figure out a sustainable way for the orphanage to feed itself. I took the easy way out, and raised money from my extremely generous friends and family overseas to buy six months of food supplies.

Initially, I was happy with my decision. It felt good to give. I saw visible improvements in the children’s health. The orphanage directors were grateful, and my family and friends at home praised me for what I was doing.

Unlike many donors, who send their money overseas, feel good about themselves, and then never follow through to see what actually happened, I stuck around to see the consequences of my actions. And I realized the problem: I had forgotten to look before I leaped.

The number of children in the orphanage increased. Why? As it turns out, a lot of the kids in the orphanage weren’t actually orphans. Typically, they had a living mother who, after her husband died, abandoned her children so she could get remarried.

The food shortage wasn’t the last thing the orphanage directors brought to my attention—and expected me to “fix.” Soon, it was soap, toothpaste, a $500 “loan” to transport corn to make money for the orphanage, help with repayment of a $10,000 loan to a Canadian couple, and, finally, $100,000 to build a new orphanage. Somewhere along the way, I had to learn to say no. No, I cannot help you, and—even harder to say—no, I will not help you. Because my help is not really help. It’s just a band-aid for symptoms of a bigger problem that I cannot solve, or even understand completely.

During my time in Ghana, I saw first-hand the inefficiencies and moral hazards that handouts create, whether from government or other sources. Not only do handouts cause distortions in the marketplace, but they also diminish the self-worth of the recipients. They create a culture of begging and entitlement. If there are positive incentives to be the most needy, then people will respond to those incentives, to both their own moral detriment and their society’s.

Is this cold-hearted? I’ve learned to use my head, not my heart, to solve problems, but it doesn’t mean that my heart is cold, or that I don’t care. Saying “no” is not saying “I don’t care about you,” but rather, “I care about you so much that I will not make the situation worse by catering to your immediate needs.”

Lauren Salz is a Barnard College sophomore. She is the executive director of the College Republicans, the communications coordinator of the Columbia Political Union, and the communications director of Columbia Right of Life. Check Your Premises runs alternate Wednesdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com