In the comments to last year's USAID post, Fabian said:
While i am happy for the existence of charity organisations, i don't get why people instead of giving to charity are so eager to force their co-citizens to give. If one charity org is not worth getting your personal money, find another one which is. But don't use the tax machine to forcefully extract money for charity. There are purposes where you need the tax machine, preventing freerider induced tragedy of the commons.
But for charity? There are no freeriders. If you neither give nor receive, you are just neutral. The receivers are not meant to give anyways.
This is a good question. I'm more sympathetic to this argument than I am to the usual strategy of blatantly lying about the efficacy of USAID; I'm a sucker for virtuous libertarianism when applied consistently.
But I also want to gently push back against this exact explanation as a causal story for what's happening when people support foreign aid.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/slightly-against-the-other-peoples
