>>>That's no better than charity. It's so easy to be generous with other people's money and feel important at that. The same spherical geometry theorem applies.
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>>Not sure I understand what you are saying. Giving your own money seems to have a little more sincerity attached ( though I grant you part of the motive is also to think well of oneself ) than being infinitely generous with other people's money.
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>There are two prerequisites for charity: 1) I have the money, and 2) they don't. For charity to work, you first need the poor (as its raison d'etre), and then the rich (as those who "have made this programming possible"). In the end, you have the charity industry, the whole apparatus which consumes a lot (in some cases up to 90%) of the money collected. And they all enjoy the feel-good sentiment, thinking that they are doing the "underprivileged" (ranks among the most stinking euphemisms I ever heard) a big favor.
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>Actually, they're just patching the system, fixing some of the symptoms here and there, while most of the time doing nothing substantial to fight the causes. But they feel good doing that.

Seems a little too cynical. In Victorian times they made a distinction between the 'deserving poor' (the widows and orphans and elderly and feeble) and the 'undeserving poor' ( the lazy, the dissolute, the drunken ) Charity isn't about fighting causes. Charity is about ameliorating suffering. But it is easier to be charitable toward the deserving poor.

Fighting the causes is another matter. That's investment in a better society. And investment must be done intelligently. That's not a good role for government because their spending other people's money. Throwing money at things doesn't automatically make it better. Inner city school systems are not underfunding so much as inner city school children are under-parented. Throwing money at a school system can't fix that, and throwing money at the parents with no requirements for behavior modification is what caused the breakdown of those families in the first place.

And a lot of giving to charitable organizations isn't done by the rich - just people who don't always wait for "the government" to do it for them. I'm not a big fan of the charity industry, but that is not to say all charities fall into that category. In Cleveland the Cleveland Food Bank - one of my personal favorites - distributes about 95% of what it receives to people who really need food and is run primarily by volunteers. And the government has nothing to do with it.