c). Don’t demand a mile from those who volunteer an inch:

When onions are expensive at the grocery, shoppers curse the grocer, but they don’t curse their friends and neighbours who do not sell them any onions at all. Nor do we find the grumblers offering to set up their own grocery stores and offer lower prices. The grocer is called up on to go an extra mile by those who themselves haven’t yet taken even the first step.

Likewise, workers curse the employer who offers low wages without stopping to curse the many other employers (and non-employers) who offer them no wages at all. This is not only morally senseless, it is also, bad economics. The employer who hires anyone – even at low wages – takes a few workers off the market and forces the other employers to compete amongst themselves for the workers who remain – which drives wages up – not down. If you are looking for a high wage job then a low wage employer is a part of the solution not part of the problem.

Or consider a landlord, who won’t rent to people he dislikes for whatever reason. Maybe you are one of those people and you now blame the landlord for being discriminatory. Nevertheless when the landlord constructs an apartment and excludes you from it, he has still done you a small amount of good. By taking in other tenants, he creates vacancies in other buildings and takes a little pressure off the housing market, thus perhaps allowing you to find accommodation elsewhere.

Or consider the Private School, which charges fees as high as it can, and still fill its seats, even as Government schools are spurned by the Parents of the children as they do not possess the same level of facilities. Should we blame the Private School owners who are at least providing the desired facilities to some children, or hold the Government responsible for not doing what it should to provide equal or even better facilities at lower costs?

Resenting the grocer, the employer, or the landlord or the private school management, while giving a free pass to everyone else in the world, who has failed to offer you low cost onions, or a good job, or the apartment you want, or a good school for your children is perhaps a relatively harmless kind of moral inconsistency. But the same morally confused instinct arises elsewhere, and it is not always so benign. Every few months or so you will see news stories about amoral profiteers who charge what is perceived as outrageous price for some critical necessity, following a natural disaster that cuts some community off from its natural resources. The News Anchors and Politicians and many so called Social Workers are always in high dudgeon about this, but we never see them trucking in the necessities and offering them at a lower price. If the amoral profiteers have a moral obligation to sell the necessities at a lower price then why don’t these Grumblers, the Anchors, Politicians and Social Workers? To say ‘that’s not my job’ is not acceptable, because if you can grumble and find fault with those who are doing something because you feel it is not proper or enough, then it is also, required of you, to yourself do what you consider proper and enough.

As Ross Perot said – “An activist is not one who finds fault with the garbage in the stream. An activist is one who gets into the stream bed and strives to clean it up”.

Likewise, in the case of small business owners who are required to hire the handicapped. If that requirement is based on some moral obligation – if, in other words, there is a moral responsibility to hire the handicapped or if the Private Schools are required to lower or cap their fees, based on a moral obligation – then the rest of us should be required to start small businesses so that we too can hire the handicapped or start a school to educate children properly at lower costs. After all, moral responsibilities, when they exist, are universal. They apply to everyone or to no one.

Similarly, if occasionally, a child decides to clear some litter from around the swing in the playground she wants to play on, we do not usually respond by ordering the child to clean the entire playground. The grocer who sells you onions but only at a higher price, the landlord who rents to others but not to you, the business owner who improves your employment prospects by hiring your neighbours but who will not hire you directly, the school who takes in children only at higher fees, – all these people have done you small bits of good. It is fine to wish they would do more but it is churlish to demand it.

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