Fake charities

Johnathan Pearce looks at a useful new site for monitoring charitable organizations:

The blogger at Devil's Kitchen has been doing fine work, as have others, in exposing "fake charities" — those organisations that while claiming to be autonomous, voluntary organisations, receive a substantial amount of funding from the taxpayer via grants and as a result, frequently take positions in terms of public policy that, unsurprisingly, fit in with the fashionable bromides of transnational progressivism, health fascism and environmentalism. The Fake Charities website does sterling work in listing those organisations that should be closely watched. The site is a great resource and well worth bookmarking.

Charities are a valuable part of our social fabric, but those which operate like the ones identified in that post are not really charities at all . . . they're actually not-quite-arms-length creatures of the state. They enable more intrusion of bureaucrats into areas best served by genuine charities, bringing along with them the coercive powers of the state by slow degrees.

I object to these fake charities for exactly the same reason I object to mandatory so-called volunteer work by students: they pervert the underlying good intentions of real volunteers and taint the whole notion of voluntary effort.

Update: A comment on Johnathan's post by "Kevin B." is worth quoting also:

The trouble is that 'charities' are such useful tools for the state that cutting them off from the statists is nigh on impossible.

For a start, many of them are there to do 'research' or 'studies' that they then use to 'pressure' the government to do what the government wanted to do in the first place.

So when the elite want to do something 'for the children' for instance, you will find one 'charity' producing the research to justify it, another to applaud the government for accepting it, and a third bemoaning the fact that the government hasn't gone far enough.