Thread drift, but my objection to encouraging charitable giving is that the more you rely on charity to fund the public good, the more you rely on (largely) millionaires and billionaires to decide what counts as a public good. In other words the average citizen doesn’t get to vote on what good gets funded. This means givers’ pet causes get funded rather than projects that are democratically chosen.

It is possible (even likely) that I've misunderstood people who were just being hyperbolic and didn't mean to be taken literally, but my impression was that some were saying that literally no charity organizations should be necessary? I (somewhat..) understand the "but then the wealthy are determining what gets done" thing, as a reason to not rely too much on it, but it seems clear to me that there are also major inefficiencies in having to go through a consensus process of government democracy, rather than people simply acting in smaller groups, independent of a larger consensus, to further charitable causes. It seems clear that there are cases where charities work better than govt programs alone, and it is a clear error to think that all charities would be better handled as a govt service, even if some would be better handled by one.

Hmm, if the government were to run a quadratic funding of charities thing, with only rather limited requirements for eligibility, perhaps that would somewhat alleviate the "undemocratic" complaint? (It would have to make it illegal to pay someone else to participate in your stead though.)

I like your last point.

The rest of your post is based on the implicit assumpion that anything government run is inherently bureaucratic and slow and charities are instead simple and fast. But that's an orthogonal issue. Some level of bureaucracy is needed to prevent misuse, otherwise you have a rich guy pay their fines from their charity. Beyond that, there is no inherent reason for charities to be more efficient. You could make those governmnent-charities have local oversight, they could be organized very efficiently too and have the advantage of democratic legitimacy.

I suspect most of them are actually saying that relying on charity for some things is a bad idea, which isn't inherently anti-charity.

I don't think it's enough reason to not give to charities because people need help right now but the fact that food pantries exist makes my blood boil. It is beyond ridiculous that feeding our most vulnerable people requires a charity to take would be thrown out food from grocery stores and inefficiently spread them around a network of churches staffed by volunteers.

If only there was a massive logistics network for getting food everywhere we could use.

there are many who think others should pay for what they themselves consider important and even get some glee out of forcing people they don't like to pay for something they otherwise would not.

then you run into those who think , why should I give to charity because its the government's job to fix that...

and finally those who just don't care

charity exist for those want to focus their person effort to fix their world and should be encourage but never be required