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.
