We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Samizdata quote of the day A charity that relies in the main part on taxes is no more a charity than a prostitute is your girlfriend.
– Guido Fawkes ruminates on how David Cameron’s idea of the Big Society differs from Big Government. Strongly recommended to all those who, like me, have to force themselves to listen to anything said by David Cameron, but who like to read Guido.
Doing this got me wondering how Fake Charities has been doing lately. Answer: it’s buzzing along very well, and is also strongly recommended.
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Maybe I’ve got this wrong, but everything I’ve read about the “Big Society”, at least before the election since I’ve hardly seen much about it since, was that it is state funding in another guise. The Big Society “little platoons” get public money, don’t they? It just draws more people into the state as “quasi-statal” corporatist bodies.
As such, it’s a continuance of the process of exporting statism to nominally non-state bodies, and not the least libertarian. It seems to me to be basically an embodiment of the ideology of Communitarianism, which in some forms uses a form of language which sounds comforting to conservatives as it evokes the cuddly good old days when everyone was, you know, part of something and we weren’t all “atomised”, that terrible individualist thing.
Remember Diddy Dave Cameron and his, “I am not a Libertarian” proclamation? I think Guido is still deluding himself that Diddy was just saying that to get statist votes and he’s going to leap into a phone box and leap out again as Libertarian-Man, or something.
It’s just more Big Government rebranded, I’m afraid, wrapped in a fluffy evocation of the 1950s, so far as I can see. But maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
It would be nice if every charity had to publish (on any advertising it does) what percent of its income came from government bodies and what percent was spent on staff wages.
I second what IanB said.
The interesting thing that Guido said about Burke’s “little platoons” is that during the 19th Century, even the early socialists – such as Robert Owen, and some of the early unions – understood the importance of voluntarism in the proper sense, of autonomous institutions.
The problem is that with any autonomous, free standing institution, that as soon as it receives tax funds, there are strings attached, and the autonomy goes.
Cameron is proving to be what most of us expected: a Tory partnernalist of the old, discredited Harold Macmillan school and with the same mixture of short-term feline cunning and hankering for power.
Until the people in that Sceptred Isle, whether they remain demographically “British” or not, determine to specify and limit the authorities of their representatives, however chosen, there will continue to be these repeated marches (joyful or forced) into such big political swamps, whether called State, Government or “Society.”
When I am accosted on the high street by various folks seeking donation from sundry charities (or ‘charities’ as the case may be), which happens a lot, I always ask:
“Does your organisation get any state funding?”
If the answer is “Yes”… I tell them that as I am already an involuntary donor, we have nothing more to discuss…
If the answer is “I don’t know”… I tell them I would only even consider assisting them once I knew the answer to that question.
You could just use the old “I gave at the office”. Perhaps modified to “I gave at the tax office”
I was not under the impression Guido thought that at all.
The media and commentators have seamlessly assumed that Big Society = Charity delivered services = government funding. They bareful conceive of an alternative.
I have not actually heard Cameroon’s accepting that; but they have rather failed to set out a positive alternative vision, so this unthinking version has been heard by default.
But in his few thoughtful comments on it, I think that Cameron does seek a genuine shift from “government must do something” to “we must do something”. But equally well realises that you cannot great a central government programme to make this happen.
Whether they have some kind of Big Society game plan I really don’t know, but I think we should allow the possibility that his heart is on this in the right place. It is a genuinely hard problem to work out how to make this shift happen. I don’t know how I would do it.
But theye at least need to disavow incorrect ideas that will otherwise take root. They have problems with coherence and clarity here.
It is a good line from Guido.
I have only one problem with it – “in the main”.
In fact once a charity starts accepting government (tax) money its independence (its soul) is under threat at once – long before the money is the main source of income.