We have to acknowledge a certain logic to philanthropy. If the society has pockets of need that are not being met, then that is proof that the society is incapable of organising itself to meet that need. If society can’t do it and a private individual decides to tackle it, then: great.

Of course this meets and reinforces a normal tendency in those who have done well out of a system and made lots of money: that they are special in some way and have demonstrably better decision making capabilities than everyone with less money than them. (This is why rich people are never rich enough, because only the richest person is the best decision maker.)

In this confluence, the premise that government is incapable and private individuals are always better takes hold in the minds of the occupants. Their tax loss aversion is given justification and isolated from reality by their ego. Pretty quickly they are steadfastly opinionated about the fraud, waste and abuse in government and, simultaneously, the incredible social value of their infinitely better perspectives, solutions, and implementations.

If you take a social problem that has persisted for decades, let’s say hungry children arriving at school, then it appears to be incontrovertibly true that government (a.k.a. collective decision making) is not just struggling with a set of priorities and complex matrix of needs, but is actually incapable. This makes it very hard to challenge the ground on which the tax-hating philanthropist stands.

If you’re lucky enough to be amongst the couple of billion people living in today’s advanced societies: it is also incontrovertibly true that for the vast majority in those societies, life is pretty good. And for all of those people, the role of government is essential in creating those conditions: safety, peace, legal protections, military protections, commercial marketplaces, sewage and energy systems, emergency responses, and so the list goes on for a very long way. There isn’t a tax-hating philanthropist on the planet who would claim to be able to organise all of that. Well, there might be a couple in America but we can all see how that’s working out.

And there’s also the fact that people have voted with their wallets. They pay their taxes and they participate in the collective solving of collective problems. The scale of tax revenues completely dwarfs philanthropic contributions. Clearly pretty much everyone believes that collective decision-making for the allocation of collectively provided resources to solve collective problems is absolutely the way to go. It is undeniable that, across nations and cultures, we the people have decided that government works better than the alternatives.

This is philanthropy’s wicked problem. How can it be simultaneously true that governments work and that individuals are better allocators of social spending? The clear fact is that philanthropists simply do not have the capacity to solve society’s problems. The biggest problems are collective problems. And collective problems require collective solutions. Collective solutions get implemented by governments, using resources collected via taxation from the vast majority of the people.

A philanthropist has to argue that government does not work. Otherwise the most obvious thing for them to do with their money is to pay their taxes. And so they find themselves standing on isolated ground, across a line from the vast majority of the people with who they must share their lives. This must be an unbearable dissonance. It probably contributes to their inclination to isolate themselves into small groups of like-minded numpties, determined not to let the logic of evolution seep into their narrow views to eat their egos. Buddha has some advice for them.