To understand why government is the wrong place for welfare programs, one must understand the difference between compulsory and voluntary.

All government programs are compulsory to the taxpayers who fund them. Private charities, on the other hand, depend on voluntary contributions. Thus, private charities must provide programs that people are willing to support because the programs are effective and are efficiently run.

To be tax-exempt, these charities must file reports with the federal government detailing how much of their income goes to their target groups.

Typical charities get about 70 percent of their donations out to those they are seeking to help.

Some, like the Red Cross and Soldier’s Angels, get over 90 percent of their donations into the desired hands.

Government programs, on the other hand, are funded whether or not any given taxpayer agrees with their approach or their effectiveness.

Furthermore, their funds are rarely cut.

Studies have found that government welfare typically gets less than 28 percent of its tax dollars into the hands of the targeted groups. Thus, if government welfare programs were eliminated, taxpayers could keep half the saved taxes, donating the other half, and more money would be getting to the needy than before.

Why are government programs so inefficient?

For one thing, private charities rely heavily on unpaid volunteers while government employees all are paid workers.

These paid workers need to do their work in government buildings or rented space and their benefits provided for.

Further, because the money they spend is taxpayer money, people have to be assigned to oversee the use of the money.

There must be assurances that the money is being spent “appropriately”, i.e., not used as payoffs to political supporters and not subject to discrimination against any class of individual.

What results from this is higher overhead and difficulty in sorting out the genuine targets from the fraudulent ones.

Back in 1965, I took Sociology 101 and learned about the works of two Scandinavian sociologists, Mannheim and Sonnheim. In the 50-plus years since then, I have forgotten which author did which study, but one produced the Iron Law of Oligarchy and the other found that bureaucracies have only two main goals: survive and expand.

How many government programs can you recall ever being trimmed back?

Even when the Republicans forced Bill Clinton to eliminate perpetual welfare payments, as soon as Barack Obama was elected president, he eliminated the need for welfare recipients to find work.

I can’t think of a single welfare program that has been terminated. Even Head Start, which numerous studies have found to be a total waste of money, continues and, here in Hawaii, legislators have voted to institute a local version.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy states that no matter what size the organization, it will be run by a relatively small group of people.

If a private charity is mismanaged, people will stop funding it.

If a government program is mismanaged, no big thing. Look at the Veterans Affairs situation.

Andrew Rothstein has been a Hawaii real estate appraiser for over 40 years.