Michael Tanner highlights at National Review Online the disturbing trend of governments creating obstacles for private charities.

The evidence suggests that private charity is simply more effective than traditional welfare at both providing for people’s immediate material needs and dealing with the barriers to their moving up the economic ladder.

Why, then, is there so much government hostility to the practice?

One might simply conclude that “bureaucrats will be bureaucrats.” The enforcers of rules and regulations soon come to believe that, in the absence of those rules, society would collapse — that the rules were disregarded, even for a good cause, we might soon come to question the need for them altogether.

But there is also a troubling skepticism toward the very idea of charity among some progressives. Bernie Sanders once flatly declared that, “I don’t believe in charities.” He said he objected to “the fundamental concept on which charities are based,” that is, individual as opposed to collective or state action.

Similarly, Chrystia Freeland, an editor-at-large at Thomson Reuters, has complained that charity violates the fundamental democratic principle that “we raise money collectively and then, as a society, collectively choose how we will spend it.” Eduardo Porter, a writer for the New York Times, cautions that philanthropy is “pretty much unaccountable to society” because it is “unfettered by democratic controls and dictated by the preferences of donors.” In arguing against tax incentives for charitable giving, Rob Reich of Stanford University calls charity “the odd encouragement of a plutocratic voice in a democratic society.” By offering philanthropists “nothing but gratitude,” he complains, we allow a huge amount of power to go unchecked.