The 5th Empire - Charity

Private charity has always been a cornerstone of civilized society. It is private charity that takes care of the truly downtrodden. The state is too bureaucratic to take care of such people. The destitute do not fill in forms. They do not go to social security offices. They do not seek help. By and large, they distrust the state. Their experience with it is mostly bad. Police officers raiding their childhood homes. Social services separating them from their parents. Orphanages leaving them unattended. None of this has foster an atmosphere of trust.

The demise of the state will be of no great concern to the destitute. The little help they are getting is provided by private charity which will only grow in importance. Private charities already provide soup kitchens and shelter. With the fall of the state, they will provide basic education and health care as well. There will be legal services and emergency insurance too. People caught up in extremely unfortunate situations will be able to seek help at the local charity.

We know this from relatively recent history. People were not left to die in the streets of America back in the days before the state started meddling in the health insurance business. Doctors treated the poor for free or at greatly reduced rates. They saw it as part of their duty to the community. There was no lack of soup kitchens and shelters either. People were more caring and engaged in community work back then than they are now. State interference has not improved anything.

Rather than helping the downtrodden, the state has a tendency to turn against them. Case in point being eugenics which enjoyed widespread support in its time. It was introduced with a wide margin of approval.

This may lead some to conclude that the 5th Empire will be no better at protecting minorities than the state. If the general public found it reasonable and even desirable that children were separated from their parents for no other reason than their eccentricity, then what is to stop an evil charity from doing the same? Why wouldn't such a charity gain the popular support that the state was able to procure?
The key difference here lies in the way the state suppresses details of individual cases and the total cost of their programs. Evil charities cannot hide the horrors of their programs in the same way, nor the cost of their implementations.

There will always be opposition to such programs, especially among targeted minorities. There will be lawsuits and bad press. To hide this requires centralized propaganda which is harder to produce in a decentralized society than in a centralized one. Furthermore, the costs associated with such programs will be carried entirely by charity donors. The costs are not hidden inside taxes but directly exposed. The combination of bad press and high costs will force evil charities to moderate their programs or go out of business all together.

James Brown, student nurse at Jacksonville University School of Nursing takes the blood pressure of a homeless veteran during the annual Stand Down for Homelessness activity in Savannah, Georgia.

By Spc. Patience Okhuofu, 260 QM, 3rd CAB Public Affairs - United States Army, Public Domain, Link