For those of you that trust the representative in Government to dole out charity better than yourself and your fellow citizens consider this. We have a representative government to some extent it will reflect the values of the majority of the populus. However the minority still has a tough time. What more the individual interests of the government workers also plays a role and these interest are not yours or the poors. The role and the power given to government officials also has a corrupting element that changes there behavior once in power. An example of how a role can change a persons behavior was played in a Stanford prison experiment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment The prison guards quickly overstepped their bounds given their power even tho they new everyone was a volunteer for the experiment. The professor overseeing the experiment let the abuse continue as he too was sucked in by his warden role. That is until his fiance questioned the morality of the experiment and it was stopped after just 6 days. My friends power corrupts. Do you really want the government to decide how to give to charity? Isn’t it enough to say you have to give?
Are you trying to convince us that the government is literally torturing Medicaid and EITC recipients?
No. But poiticians do guide benefits toward demographics they think may vote for them.
And so again, you make allusions to torture to illustrate your case? Please go back and refer to my post where I suggested that you step up the hyperbole to include mentions or rape and genocide to describe government.
No, “a charitable mandate” doesn’t work. All we have to work with here is language…
This is true under your plan as well. The charitable spending of the majority will reflect the values of the majority for the same reason that government spending does: because they are the majority.
A definitional part of mincharchist libertarianism is the idea that the government is better at some activities than private citizens are, and that it should be confined to those activities. The position that the government is worse in all respects than some combination of private citizens, voluntary associations, and market activity is only held by anarchist libertarians, and their cousins the anarcho-capitalists.
As a minarchist libertarian, I hold that if the desired goal of welfare and direct-assistance programs is to serve as a social safety net through which no one should “fall”, then the government is the best steward of this activity. The government is legally obligated to treat its citizens equally before the law. Social Security or Medicare cannot be denied to someone because of their political views, ethnicity, physical appearance, or any other such factor. This is not the case with private charity, rightly so. Thus, if the goal is a safety net, the government is the best choice.
Another issue is one that adaher pointed out earlier:
The private sector, using the power of market forces, can do some amazing things that government cannot. It can create wealth, invent and distribute products and services that fulfill customers’ needs, drive down costs through competition, and spur innovation. The free market is an amazing tool.
Private charity does not harness the power of this tool. It doesn’t have a profit motive, and it’s the same type of spending as government engages in: spending other people’s money on other people, the least efficient type. Privatizing charity will not improve it the way privatizing other government activities has improved them, because of the particular nature of charity.
Here is the difference in the Majority calculation. If 51% of the population and money has a certain preference toward charity then they can control 100% of the funds collected from the other 49%. However under a charitable mandate the 51% majority would only control 51% of the funds and the other 49% would be welcome to give to causes they care about. By allowing choice we lessen the tyranny of the majority. You say that the government can not discriminate but in fact they do. The other 49% has rights too and should be allowed to give as they please.
You say that the free market won’t provide any added benefit to charity because it does not have a profit motive. My friend people are complex and there is a lot more that motivates them than just money. Some people actually care. I know there is a group of people that do not want to look at the poor or take some responibility to address the needs of their community. They are like Scrooge who depended upon his taxes as his contribution to the poor. It is certainly more convenient this way, but this denies men their personal responsibility to society and to the poor and is the mark of the stingy and self-centered. A closed fist can not receive.
You are assuming that charties are accountable, efficient and effective. This is not so in most cases.
This would also result in an imbalance of who gets charity and who doesn’t. Many needy people would be left out or get far less than is needed.
The government programs, while not perfect, are better than taking a chance with a slew of vastly different charities that would be impossible to regulate. Bad idea. And giving 10%, that’s at least as much as people give now anyway through taxes. Makes no sense.
Few things:
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51% of the population doesn’t necessarily control 51% of the funds, depending on how you group the 51%, they could control much less than or much more than that. Income is not equally distributed, after all.
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Your explanation above is not really how government works. You may wish to read The Logic of Collective Action. Wiki has a pretty solid summary:
It may counterintuitive at first, but in fact, this is exactly what we see in action. It’s the organized, motivated groups that stand to gain the most that get the most out of government, not necessarily the largest groups. Tyranny of the majority as you describe it above isn’t actually the problem with government spending.
- It seems to me that you have to make a choice, between a plan does that the most absolute good, and one that provides a minimum of good-ness to those in need. A safety net properly concerns itself with the latter.
In what way does the government discriminate in its welfare programs?
Also, everyone is presently allowed to give as they please, and even get a tax deduction for it.
“Some people actually care” applies to government too, actually moreso in that the people who enter government and take jobs aiding the poor or otherwise needy are a motivated, self-selecting group. “All taxpayers” is not a motivated, self-selecting group, why should they care more?
Further, by defining charity as broadly as you have, why should your plan funnel more, or even the same level of, aid to the poor than our present system, which for all its faults does provide reliable material aid to those in need? What if funds pour in to animal shelters and opera houses and overseas missions and parks, but not the poor? If the problem is, as you say, that some don’t want to take responsibilty for the poor, the problem will only become worse once they are free to contribute nothing to the poor. What about your plan makes people more responsible or more caring?
ETA: To be clear, if you are relying on some portion of the public to be truly caring, you’re much better off with a system that selects for caring people than one that doesn’t. The power of the free market doesn’t aid in caring, it aids in profit, wealth, innovation, and many other worthy aims, but not caring.
Also, Joshuagenes, are you familiar with Milton Friedman’s model of the negative income tax? It preserves some of the flexibility and personal choice of your model, with the reliable, guaranteed minimum benefits of our present one. If you haven’t already, you should consider it.
I haven’t read though all of this, but I wanted to ask if we’re considered the military as part of the government’s social programs?
Which will cost time and energy. Thermoeconomically, that means energy not going to actually aid the poor. 
Certainly it has a profit motive; which is why if it can, it’ll spend little or nothing on the actual charity work and keep the money for itself. The customers for a private charity aren’t the people who are supposed to be helped; the customers are the people who are giving it money to feel good (or whatever their motive is). It has a profit motive to make them happy; the supposed targets for that charity aren’t the customers, they are a cost. The people who are supposed to be helped are in capitalist terms, a burden that any properly run capitalist institution will spend as little on as possible.
Private charity is so laden with perverse incentive that it’s impressive that it works at all, much less work as well as a government run program.
You’re right, and well said. The private sector isn’t a good match for charity, just as government isn’t a good match for producing goods and services.
It does work now, as a purely voluntary activity, but that would break down quickly under a mandate.
Well, that’s why we have two hands. One to hold open to receive stuff. And the other to close into a fist and hit someone until they give us stuff into the open one.
Wait. Were you talking about something else?
Current system = Charitable mandate + Government elites control which charities recieve and how much.
Charitable Mandate System = Charitable Mandate + Personal choice and control
Since I am not a central planning kind of guy I support the latter.
Here is one example of religious discrimination/persecution taken by the majority supported government in the name of helping people.http://www.amishnews.com/amisharticles/amishss.htm
This is also an issue with the recent ACA.
I suspect that this kind of competition for funds ends up making organizations more efficient at soliciting funds, full stop.
Those who spend more on PR may do better than those who spend on helping the poor, curing diseases, etc.
Shall we spare you also Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and all the other European and Asian communist dictators whose ruthless rule collectively has led to the deaths of tens of millions of their own citizens, and to the utterly deprived, miserable and oppressed lives lived by those who managed to survive?
The only way communism can survive is through the application of oppression enforced by ruthless (and often murderous) brutality. Human beings simply aren’t wired to live according to communist tenets and the only way to get them to do so is by force.
Why is it that of all the murderous and oppressive communist regimes over the last hundred years or so, none seem to have actually managed to be “true” communist regimes?
Well, I’m glad I asked. It’s because oppression and brutality are the only way to get people to live under communist rule. If communism were “truly” a better way of government, people wouldn’t have to be murdered and oppressed/repressed into living under it.
Simply put, far more people die as a result of government force (and/or poor planning resulting in mass starvation) in communist countries than have ever starved in capitalist countries - if any actually starve at all. There certainly has never been a time in U.S. history that I’m aware of where people were literally dying in the streets of starvation due to the so-called ills of capitalism.
The bulk of federal expenditures that could be called charity, like Social Security and Medicare, are either direct payments or reimbursements. There’s no charity in the middle.
Do you accept that there are some activities which the government is better at performing than the provide sector?
What discrimination? The Amish weren’t being denied benefits, they were refusing to accept them (and pay the associated tax). Which was dealt with through a legislative exemption.
When benefits are paid out by people not bound by the Fourteenth Amendment, unpopular groups face the prospect of being denied benefits altogether.