GoFundMe Proves the Virtues of Freedom

I recently crashed my car. The impact badly damaged my laptop. I had enough money to fix my car, but I simply could not afford to fix my laptop. I tried to offer services or use referral programs to gain the funds, but I had no luck.

As a last ditch effort, I started a GoFundMe. Within two days, I had gained enough donations to cover the costs of this laptop.

My story is just a small example of the market for charity in this world. Simply put, people like to help others. GoFundMe has raised at least $5 billion USD since its founding. This includes at least 50 million individual donors. No one forces these people to donate.

They do it out of concern for their fellow human being. Because of GoFundMe, people are receiving the funds to fight disease, to recover from a loss and to get their feet off the ground. This charity only comes from freedom.

Freedom Makes GoFundMe Work

In a welfare state, people lose their connection with the community. They take no pride in helping others for they have no direct means of determining the results of their charity. The state alienates you from the good you can do on your own. There is no incentive to do good when a monopoly on force controls the means of helping the poor. In a welfare state, the public assumes that everything is taken care of even if this is not the case.

In a voluntary society, however, people want to help people. GoFundMe is proof of this. Once again, people have raised billions on GoFundMe alone. Millions of people have helped and been helped purely from the goodwill of other people through this platform alone. Imagine how many more people could be helped if the people weren’t stolen from en masse through coercive taxation.

In other words, the welfare state hurts the poor’s prospects for upward mobility. Thanks to the goodwill of the people who helped me out, I am able to get back on my feet again and pursue writing for the ideas of liberty. Because private charity is private, voluntary, and decentralized, it is far more efficient than the bureaucratic mess that is the government.

To all who donated, this one’s for you.

You helped prove that people can be good without government. You proved that the market for charity is strong. You proved that government is an entirely unnecessary burden in our lives.

You are voluntaryism in the real world!