Charity



And so 'charity', to whom mammon erects super-temples finds sanctuary in the heart of the proletariat.

Charity refers to the act of helping other people for no personal benefit, typically by donating money or other resources to those considered less fortunate than oneself.

Guilt relief
Giving a charitable donation, according to Slavoj Žižek, is a great way for more fortunate people to relieve guilt while being the least involved as possible.

Doesn't fix the cause of the issue
According to Oscar Wilde, charity is a temporary fix to a broken system:

Instead of charity, Wilde suggests preventing poverty and the need for charity in the first place. A parallel argument can be made for the concern about the wage gap in the states; instead of an off-place slave analogy. Instead of promoting higher minimum wage, people should try and see the root cause of the wage gap. According to this argument, for both poverty and the wage gap, these are products of a a  strives to eliminate poverty and disease. Anyway, the views of socialism by Americans are divided to say the least, with roughly 17% having a positive view of socialism, another 16% having a positive view of capitalism, another 16% having positive views of both, 17% having negative views of both, and the rest either being undecided or refused to answer.

Abuse of charity
In the United States, abusive charity tactics include donating paltry sums to those in need (as low as 3% of money raised), giving away undesirable cast-off items at inflated prices (e.g., air fresheners), hiring for-profit organizations to solicit funds (or even having the charity be a front for the fund-raising company), and paying high salaries to staff. Dubious charities can even benefit the founder in the form of golf easements on land donations, and donations between charities among celebrity- and politician-based charities, that would seem mainly to serve the purpose of cementing political ties.

The claim of philanthropy by the rich has been used to perpetuate personal interests of the donor that are: of minimal or negative societal benefit, as a cover for an actual agenda, or as a form of image whitewashing. E.g.:
 * Donations by a coal baron to mining education
 * paying off Morehouse College student debt while also lobbying against making it easier for low-income students to pay for college
 * Mark Zuckerberg's putting his name on a hospital to try to whitewash Facebook's enabling genocide in Burma.

Effective altruism
Effective altruism is a utilitarian philosophy which attempts to use evidence and reason to bring about a net positive change to the word partly by avoiding charities with limited or negative impact on the problems they are trying to address  of which there are, sadly, a large number  and focusing on more effective charities. In general, this is not a bad idea, but has been criticized for mostly the same reasons as utilitarianism has. It also suffers from one of the main drivers being Eliezer Yudkowsky's Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who want to spend the money on pseudoscientific artificial intelligence "research" (fanfic and blogs) rather than mosquito nets.

Dubious charities

 * Most televangelists
 * PETA
 * Greenpeace
 * Autism Speaks

External link

 * Merchant Banker - Monty Python's Flying Circus