All those U of C clowns who love to talk about how inefficient the government is, did any of them ever look into the steaming pile of waste known as private charity? Is there a single function currently handled by private charity that would not be more efficiently done by government?
This article from Uwe Reinhart, one of the good guys at the Economix Blog at NYT suggests that no one has ever even asked the question in a rigorous way!
How about Milton Friedman? What I found from him makes me wonder about the quality of his thinking generally!
There was no income tax, no deductibility of contributions, so what people spent on charity came out of their pocket and not, as now, largely out of taxes they would otherwise pay. And yet, in every aspect of private charitable activity, it was a boom period.