I've been writing about paradoxes. Here is a fun one:
Most people do charitable things from time to time. Very few people go out of their way to file as a non-profit to get tax benefits for their charitable work.
Filing for Non-Profit status is a reach pain in the tush. It turns out that the primary reason that people go through the pain of creating a non-profit is because they have profits that they want to protect.
When lower and middle class people want to do a charitable act. They just do it.
When the wealthy perform charitable acts, they start by creating a 501 3(c).
If you page through filings of local non-profits, one can help but notice that many of the foundations seem to have ulterior motives.
A case in point is the Tron Foundation. The Tron Foundation appears to play a role in Justin Sun's political ambitions. The Mission Statement for Tron states "TRON is dedicated to building the infrastructure for a truly decentralized Internet."
This foundation that claims to support decentralization was key in Sun's efforts to centralize SteemIt.
Here we see a foundation doing the exact opposite of what the foundation claims to be its purpose.
I've noticed through the years that some of the wealthiest people I know made their money through non-profits.
In my life, whenever I want to do a charitable deed, I just do it. The only reason that I would go through the hassle of filing for tax-exempt status of a non-profit is if I had profits I wanted to protect.
The one thing that NGOs, and Not for Profits tend to do - is pay one sort of person extremely well, and that's their legal representation - so they can get out of the holes they dig themselves by treating many of their volunteers as sub-human, and exploiting their altruistic ways.
The income gap in non-profits often dwarfs that of private businesses. The non-profit might have a legion of uncompensated volunteers doing grunt work while the top of the organization has well compensated lawyers and organizers who are either directly benefiting from the group or who gain prestige through the work of others.
The term "not-for-profit" does not necessarily mean that a group has greater moral character than a business openly established with the hope of creating profit by generating wealth.
This brings up another side of the nonprofit paradox.
From a broad economic perspective the term "profit" simply means that the world got more out of an activity than the cost of the resources put into an activity.
If the world does not profit from an activity, then that activity should not have been performed as the activity consumed more resources than it produced.
Non profits tend to exist in areas where it is difficult to monetize the benefits of an activity. For example, a dentist who volunteers to fix the teeth of children in impoverished homes is engaged in an activity that produces sizeable benefits, its just that the family can't pay for the service. The world profits from the action, its just that the economic system wasn't aligned in a way to compensate the effort with money.
The problem here is not the existence of profits, but that the current economic system isn't properly aligned.
Beyond just the Tron foundation, NGOs have been perpetuating nothing short of fraud for years. Their operating cost always seem bigger than the reason they were created in the first place. I have my reservations about most of them
Non Government Organizations are another great example of how the ruling elite use paradoxes as many of the NGOs seemed to have been created to control people.
The use of the negative in this acronym is extremely clever as all private businesses could be considered a non-government organization. So, if you you say: I dislike the way the NGOs operate; statists can counter by saying: Yes, that should be done by the state.
In my opinion, most of the non-profit organizations have been established because their founders want to promote something for their own benefit. In other words, why create another organization when they can just donate directly to (reputable) charities (regardless if they make their "donation" public or not).
I strongly believe that the best way to (materially) help people who are (really) in need is to go to them directly, and give them exactly what they need (food, clothing, medicines, etc.). Avoid giving them money.