Who Do You Trust?
Let’s assume you have some money you want to contribute to a good cause. Excellent, being charitable is a good characteristic, a sign of a person who is concerned about the well-being of others and has the wherewithal to do something about it.
Who should decide how that money gets spent?
Should it be the government? Or a charitable organization? Or a church? Or some stranger you happen to meet? Or should it be you?
I have little confidence the government will disburse my funds well. They are not very efficient, so there is a big bureaucracy to be paid… that takes a big “cut” to pay salaries and benefits and overhead for all the administrators involved in the process. I’m not so sure the people who REALLY need help are the ones who get the money, either. And I’m even less certain those who need help get it in a timely manner and in such a way that it actually helps them. No, the government is not my first choice.
Some charitable organizations have a good reputation for operating efficiently and others are horrible, taking most of the money donated for themselves with little left over for those they claim to help. I like the former and detest the latter.
Churches with programs to provide assistance at the local level have an excellent reputation for providing true help to those in need, not just financial aid but emotional support. People taking care of people, which is the way it should be. Typically, though, they lack wide enough support to help many beyond their community.
A stranger on the street deciding who gets my money? They could just as easily use it for their own purposes rather than what I intended it for. Same for some telemarketer calling to ask for contributions to some entity with a good-sounding name but that you’ve never heard of. No way!
OK, so it seems some organization is appropriate to do the job of disbursing funds I contribute for charitable purposes. Who do you trust more?
- A church in your neighborhood, especially if you attend it?
- A charity you know to do a good job deploying funds.
- The government.
Personally, my comfort level in this area starts at the top of this list and goes down from there. Unless it’s part of some isolated natural disaster assistance or something like that, I don’t believe the government is the answer. Regular government programs take too much of the money as it moves from taxpayers to the recipients, takes too long to do it, creates a dependency attitude in the people they’re trying to help, has the potential of devolving into an entitlement mentality by the recipients, and may very well not also provide the interpersonal support so valuable to those in real need.
The bottom line: I trust myself to make a better decision of how my charitable dollars get spent than I do the government.
