One local politician expressed a common misunderstanding recently during discussions and debate on what the city government should do about homeless people.

City Council Member Michael Boylan is a Republican and a Catholic and to his credit has been active in several private organizations that do charitable work. He is supporting an effort to impose new food and beverage taxes on bars and restaurants.

Council Member Raul Arias opposes the move, saying restaurants already have been hit by the Red Chinese virus and inflation. He said local restaurants did not cause the homeless problem.

“But we can’t discount the fact that these folks, number one is, you know, it’s a Christian thing to do, to provide the help for others who are less fortunate than ourselves,” Boylan said, according to Florida Voice.

Well, no.

While Christians are encouraged to give their own money to charity, no one other than liberal Democrats think it their duty to take money from American families and give it to someone else based on the subjective determination that the beneficiary needs it more.

Less than 20 years after the nation’s founding, there was a debate in the House of Representatives over whether the US government should provide relief for Haitian refugees.

The record of that third congress indicated compassion was the driving force to consider whether $15,000 should be spent from the Treasury to aid those escaping Haiti in the midst of revolution.

James Madison, who wrote a large part of the U.S. Constitution and explained in at length in the Federalist Papers, thought otherwise.

Madison’s dissent was clear: “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of government. It would puzzle any gentleman to lay his finger on any part of the Constitution which would authorize the government to interpose in the relief of…sufferers.”

That wise counsel stood for more than a century until Democrat politicians found they could buy votes by taking earned income from some and giving to others, supplanting the Christian efforts of private and religious institutions that actually helped the neediest.

Since then public charity has turned into a monumentally expensive and wasteful effort by government to redistribute wealth according to a socialist viewpoint of what is right and good, not any Christian teaching.