Tuesday, May 22, 2007
I Smell A Rat
Non-Profit Industrial Complex - The Weekly Standard carried a piece in April on non-profit organizations and a growing sense that there is a need for regulation of same. I found it through Instapundit who has some other interesting links on the subject as well.) I am simultaneously heartened and afraid of what I read here. The Standard piece does carry this note:
The lack of a profit motive, replacing earning with fundraising, particularly for activities and organizations that might need to "earn" their living, also tends to grossly politicize the organization. Catering to donors becomes more important than "product" and if donors have political desires, those desires tend to get served. Thus we see organzations that originally started with good motives and agendas become radical and even non-sensical.
So why am I concerned? Well, politics being what they are, I know that if conservatives begin to try and bring this sector under some semblance of control, the left will respond by trying to include religion into the mix. Many of these non-profit organiations are the functional equivalent of the church in the mind of the left-leaning. They will fail to see the distinctions that we conservatives would wish to make. We can ill-afford in this nation to further regulate religious activity. The genuine and real barrier between church and state has already been sufficiently eroded by efforts to erect false and misleading barriers. A real functional breach in the genuine barrier could be deadly to both religion and the state.
I think that the conservative concerns here are well-founded, but the timing is awful. With the Democrats in charge congressionally, it is simply the wrong time to bring this up. This issue should be attacked only when we have very firm control and can be assured that whatever action is taken will be action that can be properly limited to secular non-profit activity.
Related Tags: non-profits, religion, tax law, regulation, church and state
If anything, statistics like these underreport the size of America's nonprofit sector, because they often don't include large religious organizations, which have a distinct tax status. [emphasis added]There is little question that the non-profit distinction is overused, and perhaps abused in this nation. Increasingly, it is being used in organizations that might typically be better served by functioning under a profit motive. The designation replaces productivity and other standard means of measuring individual and organizational performance with metrics that result in awful work ethics and an entitlement sense amongst their workers.
The lack of a profit motive, replacing earning with fundraising, particularly for activities and organizations that might need to "earn" their living, also tends to grossly politicize the organization. Catering to donors becomes more important than "product" and if donors have political desires, those desires tend to get served. Thus we see organzations that originally started with good motives and agendas become radical and even non-sensical.
So why am I concerned? Well, politics being what they are, I know that if conservatives begin to try and bring this sector under some semblance of control, the left will respond by trying to include religion into the mix. Many of these non-profit organiations are the functional equivalent of the church in the mind of the left-leaning. They will fail to see the distinctions that we conservatives would wish to make. We can ill-afford in this nation to further regulate religious activity. The genuine and real barrier between church and state has already been sufficiently eroded by efforts to erect false and misleading barriers. A real functional breach in the genuine barrier could be deadly to both religion and the state.
I think that the conservative concerns here are well-founded, but the timing is awful. With the Democrats in charge congressionally, it is simply the wrong time to bring this up. This issue should be attacked only when we have very firm control and can be assured that whatever action is taken will be action that can be properly limited to secular non-profit activity.
Related Tags: non-profits, religion, tax law, regulation, church and state
