Further, I generally strongly oppose charity as a component of future plans (leaving aside whether charity is good or necessary in the present). We should never be building society such that it depends on the funding whims of rich philanthropists.

Sure, there should be some kind of analysis of benefits, but some things simply have to exist for a society to be a society, because without them, the loss of their intangible and second-order benefits will cause a society to implode Idiocracy style, and nobody will know why.