Some People Value the Invisible Hand and Devalue a Helping Hand
I think there are a lot of people who consider it virtuous to help people through Adam Smith’s invisible hand but crippling to give them a helping hand.
That is, I think they consider it magnanimous to act selfishly and mean or debilitating to help people directly.
I can see how they get there. I think in their minds they think they’re concluding what they should do from first principles, but I suspect they’re actually rationalizing and justifying what they wanted to do in the first place. I’m not them, so I could be wrong. I’ll have to ask one of them about it.
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