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Comment by miscreanity | Hacker News Reader

There are wealthy individuals and organizations that seek to make profit from charitable projects and the example presented is far from the worst; corruption as seen in the Red Cross is one such issue. However, I expect the proportion of those instances relative to genuinely good efforts is overblown thanks to media.

The wealthy are wealthy generally because they look to make sustainable models where the goal is to avoid simply throwing resources into a pit just because it feels good to help. Doing that bankrupts everyone - consider a broader analysis before throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for life.

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> Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for life.

Which is exactly why we not only do the whole handouts-as-inexpensive-penance thing but also make sure to keep the system 'sustainable' as you put it by gating off access to the fish reserves, polluting and over-exploiting communal stocks, 'teaching' fishing as a method of being a reliant user of charity-approved fishing gear with built in planned obsolescence of increasingly confusing and complex dependencies, and of course 'supplement' the rudimentary knowledge with a complete moral reconditioning program stressing the virtues of submissive piety and gratefulness as prerequisite to rather dubious advice on self-reliance.

I cannot make much sense of your comment. But let me expand on my original comment and tell this.

The only charitable work that I consider genuine is the one that you does not know about. When you read about the work of a person 'x' of a foundation in papers/media, their work cease to be charity. It is just that the person is gaining something, in return, other than "feeling good" you mention. Superficially, or in other words, as shallow as public perception goes, it will appear as benevolent, and often times, it can be. But there is nothing that guarantees it, since the end result is not of benevolence, but something materialistic or sinister.

If the only genuine charity is invisible, how can we maintain a society with a culture of genuine charity? If charity is secret, it's too easy to simply not do charity, since there are no consequences, neither positive nor negative reinforcement.

I have my suspicions about the PR motives of https://givingpledge.org/ , but ultimately, doing good in exchange for positive PR (a form of "buying advertising") is a deal I'd take every day.

> If the only genuine charity is invisible, how can we maintain a society with a culture of genuine charity?

Why would you want to maintain a society that extols charity, 'genuine' or not? Wouldn't you rather live in a society that doesn't have a need to 'do good' as a cleanup procedure for the 'bad done.'

Before you say that's a strawman argument, consider that charity exists because things that should be considered human rights are often tossed aside as impractical to implement due to the fundamental poverty of the governance structure.

Here's some interesting tables of numbers of 'charitable giving' that will reveal your assumptions and biases:

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm

https://cdn.vcapps.org/sites/default/files/upload/VCEP%20-%2...

https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/docs/Fidelity-Charitable-...

Can you clarify this post? I don't understand what it's arguing.

How are fundamental human rights "implemented"? Why would a "right" need an "implementation"?

You are making some argument about government working poorly? How is that relevant to charitable spending?

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