This morning I was perusing TypePad's widget gallery, and I discovered "Universal Giving," a widget that allows people to select an area of specific interest and a country and the widget takes them to a site providing a list of relevant charitable organizations and an ability to make a donation directly to the organization of their choice. Social media is at work for the common good, and it is one small example of how the explosion of information technology and Web 2.0 can help create a post-statist society by empowering individuals to make a difference based upon their own rational decisions.
Some might wonder why this is preferable to wielding the power of the state to alleviate suffering, improve education, or create a more sustainable environment, but the state is inherently full of pitfalls that empirically have not yet been overcome. Specifically, the state, even in its most expansive form, is comprised of an extreme few decision-makers who make decisions on behalf of millions of other people. As G.K. Chesterton rightly observed, "It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote."
These few decision-makers only have the capacity to consume certain amounts of information, and that information is generally fed to them by people whose motivations are other than the public good. Lobbyist, bureaucrats, and legislative staff have a set of motivations that tends toward job preservation, and consequently, their recommendations, and even the information they provide to the decision-makers is heavily filtered. The larger and more remote government becomes, the less raw information makes it to the legislators and other decision-makers, and so the people at the margins are the ones who suffer the most.
Civil society, on the other hand, being comprised of every individual, can leverage the information consumption of millions, rather than thousands, and even the most niche charitable organization can get the attention it needs from civil society. Decentralization in this manner leverages network-effects, meaning that if something (in this case a severe need) is genuine enough, then there is a rapid socialization of the cause, and the need is quickly addressed or eliminated. We witness this happen in computer information systems, and increasingly, this is how many of the world's Intelligence agencies also operate. This has many advantages over rigid hierarchies that are necessary in a centralized system. In a hierarchical system, only the information that passes through the filters to the top is utilized to make policy, and even excluding the intentions of the people providing the filter function, the bottlenecked capacity of information flowing to the top is inhibited by the bottleneck of the few people utilized to get it there.
Furthermore, utilizing civil society to achieve humanitarian aims has the benefit of involving more people in the solution to the world's problems, which serves to further expose them to the existence of specific suffering in the world. By witnessing this first-hand, people are increasingly likely to be motivated to aid in more substantive ways. When the mechanism of the state is employed to achieve the same ends, only the needs that pass through the filter are actually witnessed by the decision-makers, and in most cases, the decisions are made passively and based upon the recommendations of the filtering agents. This disconnects the decision-makers from the suffering, but worse, it disconnects the people who are paying to alleviate the suffering from specific knowledge of it.
Traditionally, libertarian ideologues have asserted that if the state were immediately eliminated, that private charity would automatically fill the void, and they have essentially advocated just that. One of the tenets of Responsible Libertarianism is the development of civil society's capacity so that the state can be gradually reduced as society takes away much of the burden currently borne by government. If libertarians want to see a minimized state, then they must be willing to start by building civil society. Universal Giving is just one small example of how this can be achieved, and it now has a permanent home on this blog for that reason.
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