Forget all the businessman nonsense. Plenty of business people are liberals. That proves nothing. Understanding the kind of charity Christ taught, as opposed to welfare, is key to understanding Christ’s beliefs. Christ spoke of VOLUNTARY alms giving, not forcible redistribution. No where does he speak of government taking from one to give to another. Christ wouldn’t have even had a concept of government welfare since the Roman Empire had no such system. No, Christ spoke of the kind of voluntary charity that ennobles and exalts the giver because it’s given out of the abundance of the heart, not forced out of them. Christ was never about coercion, but about free will. He spoke of a kind of charity that isn’t a nameless, faceless bureaucrat and bureacratic agency sending off an automated check gotten from funds taken involuntarily from another to give to someone known only by a Social Security number by said bureacracy. No he spoke of the kind of charity where a giver experiences and learns compassion, love and Christ-like virtues of generosity and kindness because they WANT to give, and to a person who isn’t just some faceless number but someone the giver can assess the worthiness and need of and then from there give from the heart. This is the kind of charity that has the power to exalt both the giver and the recipient, as opposed to the sense of entitlement and dependency—as well as resentment from those forced to fund government programs they may not believe in— coming from the welfare state.
I agree with most of what you said, except that not that many liberals are business people unless they are involved in a crony venture, or high tech, or serve some government consitutency.