Mike Konczal — The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity

The right yearns for an era when churches and local organizations took care of society's weakest—an era that never existed and can't exist today.

History lesson.

With this history in hand, it’s worth teasing out a general theory of why the voluntary sector has limits in providing social insurance that the state does not. Economics as a field has theorized extensively about the concept of market failures, or moments when markets don’t allocate resources efficiently. It has also described government failures, particularly in the libertarian-influenced “public choice” theory. This focus on markets and governments leaves the study of the voluntary sector under-theorized. In turn, this lack of critical attention leads to assumptions that the voluntary sector can solve problems it cannot.Why

But the Great Recession offers the perfect case study in why the voluntary sector can’t solve these problems. If people like Mike Lee are correct, then the start of the Great Recession would have been precisely the moment when private charity would have stepped up. But in fact, private giving fell as the Great Recession started. Overall giving fell 7 percent in 2008, with another 6.2 percent drop in 2009. There was only a small uptick in 2010 and 2011, even though unemployment remained very high. Giving also fell as a percentage of GDP (even as GDP shrank), from 2.1 percent in 2008 to 2.0 percent in 2009 through 2011. (The high point was 2.3 percent in 2005.)
As research by Robert Reich and Christopher Wimer showed, the decline occurred with all sources and hit almost all types of nonprofits. Individuals gave 8 percent less in 2008 than the previous year, and their giving dropped an additional 3.6 percent in 2009. Charitable bequests fell 21 percent overall between 2008 and 2010. Contributions by corporations fell in 2008, and only slowly increased afterwards. Foundations also gave less in the Great Recession even though they have legal payout and operating rules to follow that would presumably put a floor on this.

There were some bright spots—giving to food banks, for instance, increased. But as the economy went from free fall in 2008 to stagnation in 2010, private charity still remained depressed. Worse, as a wave of austerity hit state and local governments—with large retrenchment in spending and layoffs of public-sector workers—the state pushed harder on private charity to pick up the slack of social work.

Why didn’t this sting as badly as it could have? Because of the role the federal government played. “Automatic stabilizers,” a key policy innovation of the welfare state, were there to pick up the slack. Automatic stabilizers are policies such as unemployment insurance and food assistance that maintain an income floor and security for people, which allows for more spending when an economy goes into a recession. This ability to boost purchasing power automatically is a major, effective response to a recession. These stabilizers, in turn, also decline automatically as the economy starts to recover.

The Atlantic
The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity
Mike Konczal

A huge role of a modern government is providing social insurance that only the currency issuer has the means to do. Private insurance is unable and unwilling to do so, and charity declines instead of expanding to meet the need in downturns.