The War on Philanthropy

Commentary Magazine ^ | July 16th | David Billet

[Jbny]

He is a kind of Society for th’ Prevention of Croolty to Money. If he finds a man misusin’ his money, he takes it away fr’m him an’ adopts it.

—MR. DOOLEY

Charity is said to be a virtue without compare, and yet we all know that it arouses suspicion—about the giver’s display of his generosity, the recipient’s dependency, some essential inequity that the gift only reinforces. Perhaps for this reason, Maimonides argued that the highest level of charity was not charity at all but rather helping the needy find the means by which to earn their own living.

In democratic America, what charity is and what it ought to do have been redefined in this spirit from the bestowing of alms to the performance of public-spirited works of all sorts by voluntary associations of citizens. Over the past century, such associations have grown and gradually coalesced into an economic “sector” of their own, albeit one that is not dedicated to the pursuit of profit. The chamber of commerce, the soup kitchen, churches and synagogues, the Berlioz Society, the university, Commentary—these are all voices in the chorus of American nonprofits, which collectively account for 11 percent of the overall U.S. economy.

[FBRhawk]

I think that the salient point is here:

“The role of private institutions in providing public works is something that discomfits the public sector, which time and again finds itself shown up by the competition.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that the government transfers every year to alleviate social problems have not solved the problem of poverty; government does not do it well, and often the act of subsidizing poverty has the unfortunate effect of exacerbating rather than ameliorating it. Virtually wherever public and private groups take up the same task, the private group outperforms, whether it is the Federal Emergency Management Agency versus the Red Cross in post-Katrina New Orleans, Meals-on-Wheels before and after it was adopted by the federal government, or church-run rehab clinics achieving better recovery rates than government clinics that spend ten times more per patient. This is hardly surprising, given that the private sphere enjoys the energy of individuals passionate about their work, and has greater flexibility than a bureaucracy to be nimble, to take risks, to adjust, to weed out corruption, and to move on to the next pressing task.”