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4. Thrift and Benevolence
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>> 77 4 Thrift and Benevolence Back in 1751, Franklin and like-minded citizens saw a need and put their money and resources together—yes, private funds—to open America’s first public hospital: Pennsylvania Hospital. It’s still in operation today. Franklin saw that there really were, at that time, sick people wandering the streets of Philadelphia without anywhere to go. But he didn’t expect the government to fix the problem . In fact, he refused money from the politicians and instead went to friends to secure the funding. . . . The Founders could have written it in the original Constitution—they had health care problems back then too—but they knew the answer was private, not the government. —Media personality Glenn Beck, December 15, 2009 Americans’ debates over health care reform raise a host of issues inviting moral reflection from the American people. Is health care a right or a privilege? Who should make decisions about costly end-of-life procedures? And perhaps most important, how much will health care reform ultimately cost? Aside from the ethical issues involved in health care decisions (the crazed panic about “death panels” notwithstanding), the debate over what would eventually become the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was unavoidably one about how much of a public entitlement program the United States could actually afford. At the same time, this politically charged controversy also forced Americans to consider where the responsibility for funding health care appropriately resides: with the state (as Obama initially suggested with the short-lived “public option” proposal), or with private citizens , as the conservative talk show host Glenn Beck argued to his viewers by appealing to the legacy of Benjamin Franklin. Referencing Franklin served more than one purpose in Beck’s remarks, most notably to frame the health care debate as one relevant to an individual’s interpretation of the Constitution . Yet Beck’s reference to Franklin also connects the health care debate to a larger moral concept with deep and lasting symbolic power: the moral value of thrift. Regardless of how supporters or opponents of health care reform 78 > 79 surprising decision to join his nephew’s family for Christmas dinner. If, for Franklin, thrift resulted in the virtues desired on behalf of a worthy citizen, Dickens’s portrait of avarice turned benevolence finds its greatest fulfillment and expression in care of the family. These time-honored literary portrayals of thrift and benevolence are significant not only because they exemplify both the best and the worst conceptions of thrift—the responsible Poor Richard and the greedy, selfish Scrooge—but also because they illustrate well the moral values placed on thrift and benevolence in our broader culture, as well as the potential difficulty inherent in reconciling them. Simply put, thrift and benevolence take on moral relevance because they proscribe some manner in which one is to live a good life. How people spend or share their material resources has some bearing on the well-being of others, as well as the character of the individual herself (think, for example, of Scrooge’s potentially atrophied soul and Poor Richard’s warning that avarice and happiness are incompatible). Further, thrift—defined simply as the frugal use of one’s material resources—need not be estranged from its companion virtue of benevolence. In Franklin’s conception , thrift and benevolence are almost two sides of the same coin—thrift itself is an example of the kind of moderation and restraint that leads one to share her wealth instead of hoarding it, which will ultimately bring the greatest happiness and contentment. But when we consider the meaning of benevolence more broadly—for example, as generous acts or concern for the welfare of others—we can understand why Dickens’s portrayal of Scrooge confers a much harsher sentence on thrift, as he comes quite close to pronouncing its complete abandonment as the only way to redeem oneself in generosity and goodwill toward the less fortunate. Thus finding the right balance between frugality and benevolence is not necessarily an easy project. This tension between thrift and benevolence emerges in a very clear way in economic debates—about taxes, health care reform, government bailouts, or Wal-Mart—precisely because both sides of these controversies refer to these ideas through their language, although I will argue throughout this chapter that they do so in profoundly different ways. Focusing specifically on the debate over Wal-Mart, I argue that the store and its supporters emphasize thrift as the more important moral...