Reply #53: There was a time when all charity was private [View All]

It was called the nineteenth century.

If you want to see how well it worked, read the novels of Charles Dickens.

Not only were the charitable efforts inadequate, they also reflected the belief that people were poor because they were lazy or immoral. One of the worst examples was debtors' prison: if you lost your job and couldn't pay your bills, you were thrown in jail. (How you were supposed to pay off your bills if you were in jail is something I've never figured out.) Another example was the workhouse. If you were absolutely desperate, you could get a spot to sleep on the floor and a couple of bowls of gruel per day, but in the meantime, you were forced to do pointless work: breaking rocks, turning a wheel that wasn't connected to anything, walking a treadmill, or picking oakum, a thorny plant that has no practical use.

The problem with all charity going private is the same as the problem with all schools going private, if history is any indication. They would "cherry pick" the "deserving poor" and ignore any poor people that they thought unworthy.

As much as we think of the Victorian era as a golden age of morality and stability, the actual result of ignoring the "undeserving poor" was rampant crime, child prostitution, horrible epidemics of typhoid and cholera, and few avenues of escape from generation to generation.