Generally I would expect philanthropic donations to be distributed in a significantly more cost effective and dollar/societal good maximizing way by private individuals. Unnecessary steps of wealth transfer and redistribution through government institutions are avoided that are always prone to corruption, theft, or at least the ever-present government bureaucracy and inefficiency. You will certainly find examples of eccentric billionaires throwing away charitable money to worthless causes, but I’d argue as flawed as it may be it will almost certainly be more efficient than the government.

> perhaps same things could be accomplished more effectively by government.

Perhaps. You could say the same thing about any economic activity. But go too far and you end up with, you know, Stalinist or Maoist communism with tens of millions of citizens dying of starvation. I’ll take the market economy, thank you very much.

It seems like there might be some room to maneuver in between the current system and communism. Was the US a Maoist commune 50 years ago? Or was it just a market economy with higher income tax rates on the rich?