@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch They are, but there's a systemic question there: Should they be? Private charity make sense when donors are situated such they they have information outside parties cannot. (A local food bank may be quite different in that way than MSF.) 1/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch "Institutional charity" is a name we give formal organizations that take on role we think government should take on, but take on inadequately. In that sense, they become quasigovernments. You can argue it is more a forfeit by the state than a usurpation by NGOs, but in any case we end up with many of what ought to be public functions managed by institutions whose incentives and control structure is necessarily plutocratic. 2/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch The Gates Foundation, on the one hand, does a great deal for public health. On the other hand, it has a pro-intellectual-property agenda and insists upon doing that on terms that reinforce rather than undermine a regime that is arguably (arguably not too) a root cause of the ills its ostensible mission is to fight. 3/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch What is right and what is wrong on these questions is hard to adjudicate, but what's clear is it's wrong to have wealthy donors decide them (and its wrong that wealthy donors can use philanthropy as indulgences to tidy up all the ill they do to become so wealthy). 4/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch Institutional charity sets near-term, urgent concerns, where they can absolutely do some good, against longer-term, systemic concerns, where arguably they contribute to, enable, serve as a crutch to, very great evils. 5/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch This is me making a critique I think broader than the piece we're discussing makes. But if you think that following the piece's critiques to its logical conclusion brings you somewhere near here, I don't disagree. It's where I am for sure. /fin