Archives July 2026

Voluntary Charity

There’s a trope I’ve run across a couple of times in conservative fora, that of voluntary charity, the idea that charitable giving should be a personal decision, not something forced by the state. To quote the Encyclopediat of Conservatism:

Charity is voluntary and personal; state welfare is compulsory and bureaucratic. Conservatives argue the two differ in kind, not merely in scale.

The first argument they give in favor of this position is

First, charity is a school of virtue. Giving that is chosen forms generosity, gratitude, and mutual obligation; taxation that is extracted forms nothing, and a citizen who has outsourced compassion to the state has been morally diminished, not relieved.

A similar sentiment is echoed in this editorial by Ray Nothstine in the Carolina Journal:

The reason [for donors’ generosity]? To model the message of Christmas, which embodies the kind of love that can only be voluntarily received. “Long before there was a government welfare program, this spirit of voluntary giving was ingrained in the American character,” declared former president Ronald Reagan in a 1981 Thanksgiving Proclamation.

and that

That kind of coercive effect [of using taxes to pay for charity] to create a bureaucratic caretaker society is a misguided view of charity. It’s a view that completely eschews virtue of voluntary giving.

In other words, the purpose is to make the giver feel good, or make them a better person. It’s not to improve the lives of the recipients. This feels like a main-character worldview, where other people are NPCs whose role is to help develop your character, not full-fledged human beings who’d like to get on with their lives.

Secondly, I’ve never seen the idea that giving should be voluntary applied to, say, national defense, or law enforcement, courts, agriculture subsidies, etc, even though you could presumably make the same arguments: “A society that merely punishes people by locking them up in jail at taxpayer expense merely creates a culture of criminality. We should voluntarily rehabilitate criminals”. Or how about “When the US switched from a mandatory draft to an all-volunteer military, the quality of our troops increased. So why stop there? Even those who don’t serve can donate money to buy missiles and tanks. Think how great our military would be if everything in it were voluntarily donated!”

Call me cynical, but these two things together make it sound as though “voluntary charity” is more of an excuse not to give to charity. Or to make sure that “the wrong people” don’t get their hands on that sweet, sweet cash.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think it makes more sense to focus on the problems, and the people experiencing those problems. If a government program helps ensure that a thousand people have something to eat today, even if they’re people I don’t like, well, that’s still a thousand people who’ll eat today. And if a few dozen of them use their government assistance to buy junk food instead of something nutritious, well, that’s still better than going hungry.

Another aspect of this is that government is a tool for solving problems at scale. In a democracy, we the people get to decide how our country is run, and that includes things like how much money and effort to put into helping other people, and how. Not necessarily through direct election, of course, but by electing people aligned with our views, and telling our elected representatives what the country should be doing and which problems need addressing. No, not everyone in a country will agree with what the government eventually winds up doing. You can’t get a thousand people to agree on anything, let alone three hundred million people. But we can, as a group, agree to work on some problems.

The Encyclopedia of Conservatism largely agrees:

The progressive critique holds that charity, whatever its virtues, fails the test of sufficiency. Voluntary giving is unpredictable, geographically uneven, and procyclical — it collapses in depressions exactly when need peaks, which is why every industrial democracy replaced it. Entitlement, on this view, is a feature: relief that arrives as a right preserves the dignity of the recipient, who need not perform gratitude or pass a benefactor’s moral inspection, while Tocqueville’s stigmatised pauper was precisely the product of discretionary, conditional alms. Social-democratic scholars add a structural point: poverty is produced by labour markets, housing costs, and ill health, not by individual character, so person-by-person moral formation treats symptoms. Empirically, they note that child-poverty rates in high-welfare states run far below those of charity-reliant eras, and that no private network ever matched the coverage of social insurance.

A word about that “pass a benefactor’s moral inspection”: we’ve all seen Gofundmes to pay people’s medical bills. That’s the purest form of voluntary charity, and it’s full of biases. To start with, there’s plain old fashioned racism; campaigns for Black people tend to do less well than ones for other people. They’re also biased in favor of good storytellers, or people who are better at tugging at your heartstrings, not necessarily those who need the most help.

Going back to the matter of scale: the Carolina Journal above lists a few examples of noteworthy voluntary-charity success stories:

Capitol Hill Lutheran Church in Des Moines, Iowa, just announced the forgiveness of $5 million in medical debt as part of an Advent campaign. Church leaders conclude their message by offering a commitment to continue the fundraising initiative.

Financial radio figure Dave Ramsey and his organization Ramsey Solutions recently paid off $10 million in debt for 8,000 people, including a large chunk of medical debt. A simple Google search of Christian churches and medical debt provides a lengthy list of articles detailing aggressive campaigns to pay off medical debts in the amounts of millions.

That’s great, but it’s a drop in the bucket. I’m glad that people were relieved of those $15 million in medical debt. Now what about the other $219,985 million? ¹ Are there 10,000 other churches doing the same as Capitol Hill Lutheran and Ramsey Solutions, and are they coordinating their efforts to make sure they’re not stepping on each other’s toes?

Take an example of a large-scale voluntary charity: the American Red Cross. In 2025, it had revenues of almost $4 billion dollars. That same year, the US government spent $8.75 billion on improving health around the world. And another $18 billion for peace, $7 billion on economic development, and $5 billion on humanitarian assistance. Show me a private organization that has that kind of reach.

Back in 2005, when hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, lots of people ran drives to collect canned food and blankets for the victims, and the disaster-relief folks on the ground had to explain that they didn’t have the time or manpower to sort through disparate boxes. They enlisted the help of companies like Budweiser and Wal Mart to bring pallets of drinking water and supplies. Companies that had the infrastructure and knowledge to move tons and tons of supplies from point A to point B.

Sure, it feels good to open your wallet and help someone. Or to pay for a stranger’s meal. Or to send blankets and cans of food to earthquake victims. But if we really want to help people rather than make ourselves feel better, the artisanal approach won’t cut it. We need to help on an industrial scale. If there’s a better tool than government for doing this, I don’t know of one.