How much DOES "Democrat = liberal" and "Republican = conservative" these days?

[Sam_Stone]

I think the arguments over economic efficiency are useful, but miss the big picture.

The biggest problem with government charity is that it is socially disruptive. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Now, that’s true if charity is private or public, but there’s a big difference - public charity is faceless, and tends to be seen as an entitlement. This leads the receivers of it to become embittered and demanding of more.

Private charity tends to be seen for what it is - charity. People tend to feel grateful for receiving it. In addition, private charity is much more personal - the people actually giving their time and money are the ones who meet the poor and work with them. The public employees who meet the poor are more likely to be career civil servants. This is why the success rate tends to be so high with private charities in terms of getting people back on their feet again. One of the reasons the Bush administration had so much agreement from Democrats regarding their private charity initiatives is simply because the success rate among them is so high it really can’t be disputed.

Government charity tends to just grow the number of people receiving it, and tends to distort society. For example, here in Canada the liberals keep pushing for universal subsidized daycare. Is there anyone who thinks that making day care free won’t result in an explosion of people putting their kids in day care? Of course it will. It’ll also lead to an increase in the birth rate, because one of the biggest limiting factor in having children is being able to afford to raise them while working. The net result will be a huge cost to the government, which will require higher taxes, which will reduce the incentive to work even more.

Private charity can be more discriminate. The poor woman down the street who needs to work might find a helpful community home to look after her children after school - this is a common form of private charity. But that same community home is not likely to take in the kid of the two yuppies down the street who are looking for a way to get both of them back to work so they can buy a new SUV.

[DoctorJ]

A few points:

–You guys left out the part about the welfare mothers driving Cadillacs. That was always my favorite part.

–I would encourage anyone who gets so up in arms about “able-bodied people getting paid to sit at home and do nothing” to do just that–quit your job and call up your local welfare office and tell them to start sending your check. I assure you, it isn’t as simple as that.

–Sure, people beat the system. Probably far fewer people than you suspect and far more than I suspect. This used to bug me, too. Then I realized that a lot of people were helped by these programs, and I realized that I’d rather see people get help who don’t need it than not get help when they need it. I also fail to see how private charities will be immune to such abuse.

–One problem with private or personal charity is that our community is very segmented now. This is something I’ve come across in dealing with patients–people tend to associate pretty exclusively with people like them. People who smoke will often tell you that most of their friends smoke. People with alcohol problems say that most of their friends and family have or have had similar problems.

Thus, people who need charity and people who have the ability to provide charity are not usually in the same “community”, in a sense. I think most people will try to improve their own community before branching out to others. The church has traditionally been an exception to this, as a particular church’s membership would usually contain a good cross-section of society, but I’m not sure how true that is now.

Having the bulk of charity run through the government essentially expands that notion of “community” to the country as a whole, and it theoretically identifies where money will do the most good and applies it thusly. I don’t think any of us would argue that it couldn’t be done better, but in my experience, it does a pretty good job of getting money and effort where it needs to be in most cases.

Dr. J

[Kimstu]

SS: When you subsidize something, you get more of it. [emphasis added] […] For example, here in Canada the liberals keep pushing for universal subsidized daycare. Is there anyone who thinks that making day care free won’t result in an explosion of people putting their kids in day care? Of course it will. It’ll also lead to an increase in the birth rate, because one of the biggest limiting factor in having children is being able to afford to raise them while working.

I tend to be skeptical about simplistic, Econ-101-type arguments like “when you subsidize something, you get more of it” applied without caveats to the workings of large and complex societies. For example, your inference “subsidized day care => higher birth rate” doesn’t seem to be borne out by evidence from societies that actually have subsidized day care, like the notoriously low-birthrate countries of France and Sweden and the Netherlands.

You can’t just invoke a general economic principle in isolation from all the other factors that affect the complicated interactions within societies, and expect to get accurate predictions from it.

This is why the success rate tends to be so high with private charities in terms of getting people back on their feet again. One of the reasons the Bush administration had so much agreement from Democrats regarding their private charity initiatives is simply because the success rate among them is so high it really can’t be disputed.

Sure it can: cite, please? It’s true that lots of folks are cheerleading for the superior efficiency of private charities, but their claims seem to be based more on anecdotal arguments and emotional attachment than on actual data. Everyone likes to think that the kindly nun or neighborhood volunteer must be more effectual in helping the poor than the cold faceless bureaucrat, but they don’t back it up with evidence. For example, this 2001 article comments on the lack of data supporting the popular notion of the superiority of faith-based charities:

Given how frequently such claims are repeated, it may come as a surprise to learn that there is virtually no scholarly evidence to support them. “We don’t have the research to tell us whether faith-based organizations are better or not,” says Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at the Hartford Seminary who is in the process of completing a survey of more than 540 congregations. “Nobody has done the comparative research.” Mark Chaves, a sociologist at the University of Arizona who has conducted numerous national surveys of church-based social programs, agrees. “It can’t be said strongly enough how little we know about whether religion makes a difference in the effectiveness of delivering services.”

Common beliefs about the advantages of private charities, with their lack of government bureaucracy and regulation, also tend to overlook the fact that the “successes” of many of them are simply appalling:

Over the last 10 years, more than two dozen teenagers have died in so-called “tough love” rehabilitation facilities that use violent confrontation and exposure to primitive living conditions as a means to a cure. At least three girls in different facilities died from dehydration or hyperthermia following forced exercise; a 16-year-old California boy died of an infection after staff laughed at him and forced him to carry a basket filled with his vomit- and excrement-covered clothes; a 12-year-old Florida boy died in 2000 when a 320-pound counselor physically restrained him (the counselor said he thought the boy’s complaints that he was unable to breathe were “fake”). Not all victims of such “treatment” die, of course: Many just end up with posttraumatic stress disorder or in a coma, or are discovered tied up in closets. Some of the programs where these incidents occurred were explicitly faith-based; some were not.

Yes, there are lots of good private charities out there; but let’s not get carried away by emotional preference, or the naive belief that privatization always means improvement, to the point of ignoring the necessity for detailed factual evidence to support the assumption that private charities are automatically better than government.