

So first off, you can totally volunteer for government things. I mean, I can volunteer at my local government library for instance, there’s nothing about a government contract that removes the ability to volunteer.
But I wouldn’t need to have volunteers if the red cross and all competing charities were swallowed up into one thing.
There are a bunch of organizations that do the same or part of what the red cross does. That’s a lot of wasted time of resources, that would be better spent lumped together as a collective unit.
Charity is simply one of the places you absolutely don’t want competition/capitalism. You want oversight and efficiency, that’s the government.


I mean, you can look anywhere, whether it’s upwards of 70% of medical donations not being used: https://academic.oup.com/inthealth/article/11/5/379/5420717?login=false#151492984
Also you can dive into the problems with definitions of “the cause” https://hbr.org/2009/06/beware-of-highly-efficient-cha
A charity can loosely define what counts as their cause which means they can tell you that 95 cents on the dollar go to the cause, even if it’s only 20 cents.
Moreover it’s really suspect that the rich keep getting richer even in the “nonprofit” sector: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/4/24/15377056/big-charities-best-charities-evaluation-nonprofit
Furthermore, even from an innocent standing. When you have multiple charities working on the same thing, that’s crazy inefficient.
Let’s talk about the Red Cross, great organization. One of the things they do is blood donations. They’re responsible for about 35% of the blood donations in the US, the rest come from other non profits.
That means there’s competition among the non profit blood donation organizations to provide blood for emergencies. Whether they want to compete or not, they have to.
Just from a blanket statement, if you moved all of those blood donations under a single entity, you remove a lot of inefficiencies.
You don’t need to advertise for multiple organizations, you don’t need to coordinate with all those different organizations during a crisis, you don’t have the same overhead for the same problems across multiple organizations. It’s just by design, inefficient. It’s not their fault.