It’s a constant trope of the left: in a sort of lazy appeal to conservatives and Christians, progressives love to pick pieces of the Bible that they can use for their own rhetorical gain. And yes — they will use the altruism displayed by Jesus in the New Testament for this purpose whenever it suits them.
Of course, when quoting the Bible, leftists will leave out the part where Jesus beat up a tax collector, or advocated for small government (“give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”). They will also leave out the part that, at the time, Jesus was leading an anti-government coalition of disenfranchised Jews who were sick of living under Roman rule. But, who will build the roads, right?
Forget all of that: the biggest indicator that Jesus was not a socialist, as the left is fond of saying, is that he was actually effective in doing what he said he was going to do. He didn’t wait for the Roman Emperor to start taxing people to death for a bread and circuses program (that happened much later in Roman history). Jesus and his disciples fed the poor themselves.
20th century socialists took the opposite approach. They didn’t do anything themselves. Instead, they forced others to do it for them. They fed millions of people to death.
