Thread by @Molson_Hart

I don't give money to charity.

I don't like charity.

I think it's massively overrated, especially in the United States.

Here is why:

The stated reason for charity is to help others, but in reality, most charity is actually about helping yourself, eg to signal virtue, repair your reputation, put your name on a building for status, establish that you're ina group, or at best to make yourself feel better.

There are too many tax tricks associated with charity in the United States.

If you make a big cash windfall, set up your own charity, donate all the money to it, and don't pay any taxes until you want to do a withdrawal.

That's not in the spirit of the intention of the law.

Most charities are run with extreme waste.

Because it is so difficult to measure their efficacy, unlike a for-profit corporation (are you making money or not?), it's easy for them to grow headcount so long as they continue to attract donations.

A lot of charity employees make way too much money, and effectively use the charity to siphon money off for their personal benefit.

It's one thing when people do this at for-profit corporations, but when you're supposed to be helping people? It's extra gross.

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime.

Most charities don't even ask the man if he needs a fish.

They just throw him one, on the assumption that he's hungry. In reality, those fish, more often than not, are never eaten.

For example, a lot of people in Africa die from Malaria.

Someone got the bright idea that all they were missing was mosquito nets, as if they were that stupid, that they didn't realize that they could stop this with mosquito nets.

They used the donated nets, for fishing.

Again, because there aren't strong market mechanisms whereby only the charities that actually help people continue to survive, like in capitalism, charities that do absolutely nothing but make people feel good about donating can exist for decades.

When your existence is dependent on continuing donations and not helping people, it turns out that that is what you focus on, instead of listening to the people you're meant to help; this renders the charities totally ineffective.

Hate to say it, but some problems are insoluble. There isn't a nation on this earth that has "solved" poverty. You can make it better, sure, but some things are a feature of humanity, not bugs, and mathematically some people will live worse than the other 90% always.

To me, the single worst thing about charity vis-a-vis their promise vs. what they actually deliver on is the lack of costly consent of the people they help.

Do you want a mosquito net? Yeah, sure.

Do you want to pay for a mosquito net? Nah, i'm not going to use it.

That's what makes capitalist, profit-driven solutions to the world's problems so great.

Africa's problems aren't solved unless the African people say "yeah, that is actually going to help me, I'll pay for that." This is totally different from how charity works.

Charity is grossly overrated.

If you want to help people they need to be committed to it as well and charity doesn't do that.

You're not a bad person for not giving money to charity if you live your for-profit life in a way such that when you make money you're helping people.

That’s the end of the thread but here’s your bonus tweet.

I wonder how many NFTbois know this:

https://twitter.com/vhmth/status/1467147145732149255