Post No.: 0902
Furrywisepuppy says:
Charities and publicly-funded projects and institutions are important in civilised communities. Not all businesses that are highly profitable are good for society (e.g. firearms retailers), and not all institutions that operate at a loss are bad for society (e.g. publicly-funded national healthcare systems). The free market doesn’t serve needs – it serves what’s profitable. For instance, there are millions of people in impoverished countries who desperately need medicines but since they can least afford them, they’re the least served by the free market. Fully automatic rifles are also an example of just because the free market demands something, it doesn’t mean it should ever be supplied. Commercial interests can often be prioritised over human rights or environmental concerns too.
If you disagree with the concept of charity but were born with any kind of privileges compared to the poorest people on Earth then how about denying yourself those unearned gifts? What you inherited for free could be regarded as charity bestowed onto you – more excessively so if you inherited more than you needed to just survive.
Sometimes individual charities can get it wrong but not because of the concept of charity (the good intentions) but due to the poor planning and execution of particular campaigns or inefficient expenditures, like when humanitarian aid actually ends up in the hands of corrupt tribal warlords when the aim was to get this aid to those starving in the destitute and war-torn places of the world. And it’s not like for-profit businesses have never made bad decisions or wasted money(!)
Corrupt individuals don’t make the idea of charity itself corrupt – just like cheats in sports don’t make the idea of sports a non-starter. The problem isn’t the ‘kind donors’ but the ‘selfish and corrupt fundraisers or thieves’. Sometimes militant forces or local profiteers seize consignments of aid and end up selling them on the black market instead of passing them onto those in need but, although naivety should indeed be learned from, the real condemnation should be squared at the self-interested profiteers, not the charities. If some charity workers on the ground do something unconscionable that wasn’t fundamental to their charity efforts then those individuals should be caught, punished and halted, not the idea of charity or altruism itself. It’s like just because a subset of humans do something wrong, it’s not a question of whether all humans should cease to exist(!)
A problem that sometimes rears up when there’s a crisis and charitable donations are demanded is that a few people exploit this kindness by setting up scam charities that steal donations. This again isn’t the problem of charity but of scammers. Kindness isn’t wrong – selfishness and greed are.
Charities must be heavily regulated, and they are. When punishing genuine charities for breaking the law, financial penalties can alienate donors though because the fines are going to be paid from donations. Yet there must be an incentive for them to follow the law. The money from such fines should go to improve lives elsewhere anyway because it enters the treasury.
Some argue that some charitable funding campaigns are frivolous. Perhaps someone just wants beer money! Sometimes asset-rich people request donations to fund medical treatments for a family member because they don’t want to sell and liquidise their own assets to fund it themselves(!)
Or some fundraisers essentially want to be sponsored for going on holiday because they claim it’s for raising awareness of a local cause there, when it’s really for their social media pages because they could’ve themselves donated the money they’ll spend on the airfare, accommodation, modern kit, etc. for the cause instead of asking others (less middle class) to donate. They’ll take the credit too because at the end of this holiday they’ll claim to ‘have raised x amount for charity y’ and make themselves seem like the hero who sacrificed something. One of the worst examples is flying to remote parts of the world in the name of ‘ecotourism’. Some even want some of the donations to cover the costs of the trip! (Sponsoring someone for doing something for a charity used to be for things people didn’t want to do i.e. work, a sacrifice or hardship like giving up confectionery for a month, facing a genuine phobia or participating in some humiliating task or personally painful challenge. If it’s fun then it should have a low organisational cost, like a fun run.) Of course this parallels businesses that reputation-launder or try to associate themselves with charitable giving in order to exploit the ‘halo effect’ for image purposes.
People may also set up new charities that already have well-established charities that deal with the exact same issue when it creates more efficient economies to pool resources that are in aid of the same cause together. Or perhaps if it’s such a major persistent issue then the government should deal with it as a public health matter.
We can naively impose what we think is best for the recipients of aid. So charities have now learnt to consult the recipients during the process.
We mustn’t forget that our taxes go to improve and save lives too, like for funding public healthcare or welfare, or simply education, emergency services or national security, for instance. In the UK, taxpayers can allow charities to claim what’s called ‘gift aid’ on their donations, which means that you can effectively divert some of the taxes you’ve paid to the treasury towards the registered charities of your own choice rather than what the government would’ve chosen to spend it on. Charitable gifts are tax deductible generally. This demonstrates that taxes are ultimately intended for the greater good too. An analogy is like tax is for feeding harp seals, but if you’re going to feed harp seals yourself then the government doesn’t need to collect taxes from what you’ve spent to feed harp seals in order for the government to feed them.
Foreign aid is sometimes given as a way to politically influence the governments of foreign countries however. Is this smart diplomacy or sneaky coercion? We can even end up with situations like China receiving foreign aid for the poorer parts of China whilst China sends aid to other countries that need development! Yet for-profit private corporations frequently gain as foreign investors too (e.g. Halliburton was accused of war profiteering in Iraq).
The Red Cross/Crescent/Crystal may be seen as helping ‘the enemy’ but they’re precisely supposed to be a neutral humanitarian organisation that helps whoever needs aid.
‘Chugging’ is meant as a derogatory term for street fundraisers (a portmanteau of ‘charity muggers’) but this sentiment speaks more about the close-fisted than the fundraisers. If you can’t donate then politely say no. It’s okay. Donate whatever you can.
…Whatever the case, there are far more active charitable causes that are worthwhile than not, and many that are seriously under-funded too (e.g. combating antibiotic resistances, which currently claims over a million lives annually).
It’s unfair to think that charities are failures if we’ve been collectively donating to a cause that still persists after many decades of research (e.g. cancers still blight lives). There are many cases where furry charities have prevented situations at an individual or population level that would’ve been worse. And it’s not like for-profit entities have successfully solved all our wants and needs(!)
Charitable donations have been working to make positive changes, like with regards to tackling extreme poverty, infant mortality, HIV, deaths from conflicts, literacy rates and more. Woof!
From the insular perspective at one end of a spectrum, the rest of the spectrum can seem homogenous. So a person born and bred in utter wealth and privilege may think that anyone with less than a car bought from new on their driveway is ‘lower class’; or the ‘middle classes’ may think that anyone who walks for miles to fetch a bucket of water is in the same bracket as anyone who cycles for miles to fetch a bucket of water. But whereas $3 extra/day probably won’t make much of a difference to your life if you live on more than $64/day – it makes a massive positive life-changing difference to anyone who currently lives on less than $1/day.
Whether due to global interventions and charities or local government interventions, and with medicines, education, aid or investment, or other reasons – the number of people living at/below ‘extreme poverty’ decreased from 1.91 billion to 1.22 billion from 1980 to 2010 according to the World Bank.
Big problems therefore still remain, and some problems are only relatively new or have been growing (e.g. inequality has been widening as the rich have been getting astronomically richer, and power is always relative, so you could have $1M to bribe an official but if your opponents have $10M then they’re going to win) – yet the world is improving in many ways too. People should overall feel heartened by charitable, as well as enterprising, efforts because they’re on the whole working to improve the lives of people globally – we should therefore continue to donate.
Charities are not for-profit, yet are part of the economy, so are clear examples of altruism in economies.
Bad or selfish intentions seldom receive criticism – in the sense that you can’t really screw up bad intentions that you end up saving thousands of lives(!) It’s like some people’s views of their boyfriends – a ‘bad boy’ could be a lazy, forgetful lout every day, but on that one day he remembers his girlfriend’s birthday, she thinks he’s actually deep inside a thoughtful and loyal boyfriend. Meanwhile, if a boyfriend who’s dedicated and considerate every day suddenly one year forgets their anniversary, she might think deep inside he doesn’t actually care and could be hiding something! So people trying to do good cannot fall short of perfection otherwise their reputation is ruined, whilst openly bad people can commit selfish acts without criticism and only surprise us by doing better than what they promised or we expected. The notion of ‘I trust them more because at least they’re honest about being selfish’ is bizarre!
Doing good can coexist with profitability. Yet there was a huge loss of trust in private equity ‘impact investing’, or financial investment into positive impact goals like ‘ending world poverty whilst making healthy profits’, after The Abraaj Group fraud case.
Charity creates a better world where people are looking out for each other and feel peace is possible. And what’s goes around comes around. To be more selfish in the long-term, we need to be more selfless in the short-term. Altruism isn’t for this calculated expected future return however. For most, it just feels innately good to share and help. And it must’ve evolved to feel good because it was beneficial for the species in some way. Not that we give with the conscious aim of feeling good – it’s usually out of empathising with someone’s terrible feelings for their terrible situation. So selfishness differs from altruism because selfish acts are done with the conscious aim of hoping to personally receive something (greater) in return. Sometimes we can never reasonably expect a return from a recipient of charity (e.g. terminally ill children cannot feasibly do much for us in return). And altruistic acts will still continue even if one’s previous altruistic acts didn’t reap a personal return.
This may be regarded as personally irrational – but for a bit of time or money if you can afford it, it may not be much to you but mean the world to someone else. So much good for society and ‘expanding the pie’ can propagate from a single act of kindness; just like so much destruction and ‘negative sum’ can stem from just one act of selfishness, greed or violence. And we’d rather, rationally, wish to live in a world of peace and harmony than conflict and enmity.
Charity is ultimately an evidently fit cultural meme across both the religious and secular world.
Woof!
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