Abolish charities ?

Hi All,

As a Jew it is a commandment for me to given 10% of my gross earnings to charity, although this does not have to be given to charities.  Which is just as well as I don't think I could actually given anything to many of the major charities, given what I see as infiltration by extreme left wing and anti Israel activists.

Given the current disgraceful scandal at Oxfam(which I have little time for, given their unfair criticism of Israel/way they dealt with Scarlett Johannsson) , I honestly think it is time to review the whole charity industry. Why for example do so many of the big charities actually get money from the government and European Union? Are they actually fit for purpose? And why do so many charities seem to be hotbets of left- liberal dogma ?  You see this in the commentary the Guardian has given the scandal at Oxfam. Oh and what is the actual amount spent on the people who apparently need this help? What is the possible justification for paying  £100,000 for the top people? 

But the real issue to ask is that do these charities actually reinforce the problems of 'the third world' ,  in so much as they seem to be the equivalent of 'helicopter parents'. In other words they swoop into a situation or see a problem, without actually thinking of the long term consequences of their actions on the people they try to help. It actually seems to me that it is a case of 'the white man's burden' . 

I would maintain that  the many problems of the third world stem from the lack of efficient and honest government, wherein charities seem to do the job that a government should do. I am currently at home and the tv is on in the background. There's an advert about some poor child from somewhere in Africa, who has to go to a dirty pool of water and then it cuts to some animals weeing into the same water. The charity says "£1 a month" could solve this problem. Then there's the donkey charity appeal. But why isn't the government of that country actually doing this if it is only £1 a month to solve?  The answer is in part corruption, but also I suspect that the government of that country doesn't care. Charities will step in and do their job, in whatever circumstances. There is no responsibility or accountability for their own people, no need to spend or plan on agriculture or water security , because someone else will do it for them.

Another example I can think of is Angola as Rainbow mentioned it on the other thread. Once a country torn apart by civil war and hit by the Portuguese  exodus after independence it is experiencing growth of 10 to 20% , in part thanks to oil and of course the lack of civil war. But one thing I noticed on Wikipedia  was that Angola has subsistence farming. But it does have fertile soil and uses only 3% of that land for this hand to mouth agriculture . Some of this land cannot be used because of the land mines left over by the war. But this means Angola actually imports food, whereas during the rule of Portuguese , it was a breadbasket . What charities should do is focus on clearing those land mines, training for farming and the tooling. This would make Angola sufficient in food and  provide the basis of  political  stability , ie the ability to feed people.

A final example I can think of in terms of self help and reliance is Israel. In the early years of the state Israel had to fend for herself. On top of this was the task of absorbing nearly 1 million Jews from Iraq and the middle east. The Arabs, one suspects, thought that such a massive flow of poor Jews (in so much as we'd been stripped of all property and wealth in order to be allowed to leave) would cripple the new state. It didn't , but it was extremely tough , with my relatives  who'd stayed behind after 1941 and a decade later  ended up in Israel, living in tented  desert  refugee camps in third world conditions.  Yet this was without charities or foreign government aid (America did not start to supply any aid until the later 1960s) and despite constant threat of destruction, in time Israel prospered and now has the highest life expectancy and per capita GDP in the region, an excellent education system  with other indicators akin to Western Europe.

So in short is it time to abolish or at least break up the big  charities (as aside from charity) or maybe stop government funding of them ?