The problem with scaling mutuality through charity

There is a tendency on the right to lionize charitable giving and volunteering as a superior method for people to take care of one another relative to having the government do it. Many conservatives hearken back to de Tocqueville's eloquent rhapsodies on the way Americans participated in "voluntary associations" to help one another. Barn-raising is probably the most paradigmatic romantic instance of it. Sadly there's not much barn-raising these days, and where there is something analogous (Habitat for Humanity builds) there's often a need for people who know what they're doing to go back on Monday to fix some slapdash work done by a volunteer on Sunday.

Americans do both give money and volunteer their time at pretty reasonable clips. But it's nowhere near enough. Charitable giving hovers around 2% of GDP, whereas the aggregate value of hours volunteered is estimated at around a quarter of that. Even if we assume that the value of hours volunteered is low by a factor of three we're still not doing that well.

Of their own free will people are willing to give to a point to their neighbors and relatives. But our willingness to do so falls off quickly when people are more distant. Which is a massive structural impediment to realizing any kinds of economies of scale through individual giving.

So there will always be a need for the state to play a major role in helping us care for our more distant neighbors. We'll never do it ourselves. We can't.