Before proceeding down this line of inquiry, let me return to question (2), Should the government force me to behave altruistically? To answer this, I must know how I would act in the absence of laws. If I saw a starving person on the street and there were no laws requiring me to pay taxes that would be redistributed by the government to this person, would I help this person? We might observe the proportion of people's incomes that they donate to charity, note that, in aggregate, they are not enough to save the majority of people starving on our nation's (let alone the world's) streets, and conclude that the only way to ensure that everyone's welfare meets minimum standards is to require people to give what they would not give of their own volition.

However, this conclusion would also be premature. Our behavior in today's society is not necessarily representative of how we would behave were there no laws. In fact, there are good reasons to expect that we would donate much less to charity in today's society than we would were there no laws. First, those of us who are concerned with the general welfare will have to give much less to charity given that we do have a welfare system than if we didn't in order to achieve a given level of welfare. To illustrate, if we wish everyone to have a minimum of 100 units of wealth and the government provides for 75 of these units, then we have only 25 units to make up for by donating to charity, while if we did not have a welfare system, we would have to donate all 100 units. Also, if there is intrinsic value in helping others (i.e., if we value it as an end in itself, not as a means to an end), this intrinsic value could be decreased if the value is made extrinsic by the government. In support of this hypothesis are experiments (reviewed in Deci, Koestner, and Yan, 1999) in which, for example, children who were paid (i.e., were given extrinsic value) to play a game that they already enjoyed (i.e., that had intrinsic value) ended up playing the game less once the extrinsic reward was removed. Similarly, if people naturally enjoy helping others and are then required by law to do so, the subsequent enjoyment may be decreased and thus our current level of giving might be less than what it would be if there were no laws requiring it.