In Victor Hugo’s great novel Les Miserables, Jean Valjean is sentenced to five years on the prison galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. It is an outrageous sentence, and Hugo intends it to enrage us and to move us to charitable action.

I wonder what Hugo would have made of the city governments in the US who would have punished not only Jean Valjean, but also anyone who tried to help him through unapproved channels. I wonder what he would have written had he lived long enough to read that in the past year, 33 more American cities have enacted laws that make it illegal for you to give food to the homeless.

Whatever one thinks the proper role of government is, it surely is not this. At a bare minimum, we must demand that the government not force us to be less kind than we already are.

It is, perhaps, time to remember that anger–as well as charity–is a virtue.  We owe the latter to one another, and we owe the former to those who try to prevent us.