Isn’t that the problem? I tried to express that in my post, it is what made it hard to write — of course there are problems, and there are people who need help, but can’t we address that without government?
Well, you can’t, if you want to guarantee they all get helped. (Government can’t do that either, but the presupposition is that if government has a program, everybody who needs it is miraculously helped).
Churches provide much of the foundation for help in this country, or did before government. But there were also secular charities, because society saw the need. But then society, which controls the government, decided that it was easier to use their government for this than to maintain separate charities. Also, government could compel charity out of everybody (taxes).
If I thought Gingrich was proposing a non-government solution simply as a way to explain how he could get government out of it, I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t think that is what he is saying.
"Society" doesn't make decisions, people do.Common Sense
By Thomas PaineSOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer! Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.