UNCHARITABLE THOUGHTS

The Australian of the Year for this year is a football player with 
Motor Neuron Disease who raised lots of money for an MND charity. 
That doesn't sound like a great choice to me, but the Australian of 
the Year thing never does in the first place. Best ignored, but the 
news always dominates radio and TV news on Australia Day so I never 
can.

This time it got me thinking again about charity itself as a 
concept. It seems to me like a democracy that needs charity isn't 
working right. Although it also seems to me that, while legal, some 
charities will always exist even if they're not needed.

My doubts start right from the beginning of their asking 
individuals for money. Some famous footballer dying of a terrible 
disease says you should send a charity some money and they'll 
assist sufferers like him. On the other extreme, some famous movie 
star says they've found the secret to happiness and you should send 
money to the Church of Scientology to help them spread the word. 
What's different here? Why do you believe one star and not the 
other? Both individuals may speak of true personal experience being 
helped by their respective charities, but their posisiton of 
influence could have been exactly why they were treated so well. 
How do you know precisely what the bulk of your money goes towards, 
without extensive personal investigation? Unless you actually work 
with the charity yourself and see all its operations in detail, 
what proof do you have that your donation will really do any good 
at all? And how can you possibly do that research work for all of 
the equally-worthy-sounding causes which will approach you for 
their share of your guilty wealth? Plus those other worthy ones 
which don't approach you because their not spending great amounts 
of donated money on advertising.

The only answer, it seems to me, would be to create an organisation 
which can assess the needs of the population, assess those serving 
the needs, and rationally distribute funding to them according to 
strict rules of oversight. We have in this case reinvented 
government, and that is exactly my point.

Charity might make sense in an anarchic society, but once you have 
a government, one that you're obliged to fund in the first place, 
you have a system which, working correctly, should fulfill the 
exact role of charities without the massive risk of inefficiency or 
fraud affecting them due to the inability of their donors to spend 
time investigating their operations in detail. In a democracy, if a 
need is seen to be unmet, those funding the government can vote for 
a party which will distribute funds to serve that need. Should it 
do this poorly, such as by funding an organisation equivalent to an 
inefficient or corrupt charity, the public will next vote for an 
alternative which can oversee the use of funds more effectively.

Of course this democratic ideal isn't remotely realised fully in 
the real world, but only through failings which may exist inside 
charities too, with vastly less attention given to them. In fact 
short of extremes like the Church of Scientology, it's taboo to 
question the integrity of charities, individually or in the media. 
Their puclic image is the polar opposite to the dirty world of 
government politics, yet corruption affects both sides in much the 
same ways. The difference is that you're forced to contribute money 
to your government, but only obliged to contribute to charity.

So by and large I don't do the latter. I feel like democracy should 
do the job for me, and even where it often doesn't, charities offer 
no greater hope. As seen here on my phlog, I take the time to 
research all political options and policies pre-election, at a 
frustrating cost to my time and sanity. This might be pointless 
given the mass of idiots simply swayed by political advertising and 
celebrity endorsements, but the same applies to the charities that 
those idiots fund as well! At least politics makes some base 
attempt to offer an equal playing field on which all political 
parties can stand for those willing to look, even if that's only an 
excuse for forcing everyone to fund the winning one.

 - The Free Thinker