Do I have a right to what is yours?

Born in North Carolina, the fifth child of a housemaid, brought up in Harlem without a father, high school dropout, Thomas Sowell had every reason not to succeed. So how is it that a young black like that managed to graduate from three of America's most intellectually elite universities, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago (PhD) and then go on to teach at several top universities? Currently Dr. Sowell serves as Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford University?
       But it is not his achievements in academia that impress me at the moment, but his insights into life in today's world. For instance:
       "I have never understood why it is greed for a person to keep what he has earned, but not greed to want what someone else has earned.”
       "What is one person's 'fair share' of what someone else has earned?"
       As our struggling and nearly bankrupt nation searches for ways to balance a budget that clearly spends far more than its expected revenue, there has been a lot of talk about morality in a free market system. To what extent are those who do well responsible for those who do not? Is it right for a government to take from one sector and give to another? What is a "fair share?"
       I have little expertise on the subject but it seems to me that moral obligation is an individual matter. From a Christian stand­ point, if my neighbor is hungry I have the responsibility to share with him what I have. That is something I do as an individual. I do it because it is an expression of brotherly love and that is a moral requirement of the Christian faith. Now, if a dozen families should organize themselves into some sort of social unit, would they as a group (though their leader) be responsible to tell each family how much they should give to the disadvantaged member? Would it be right for the group to tell member A (who has been out of work for six months) to give only a single sack of potatoes, and member B (who happens to have had an exceptionally rewarding year) a truck load of produce? I think not. Supplying the need of another is the responsibility of the individual. To shift it away from the individual to some sort of group effort is to deprive the individual of the personal pleasure of meeting the need of another. That runs contrary to what is best both for the individual and for society at large.
       To answer the earlier question, I would  say that  no one has a "right" to what belongs to another, and that ultimately the question of "fair share" is something that each person must work out with God.


























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