Reddit reviews Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential (Civil Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives)

>Actually, conservatives donate to charity more than liberals do.

Charitable organizations are an order of magnitude smaller than their government counterparts. Because of structural restraints, non-profits simply don't achieve the scale of operation that would be necessary to significantly alter the lives of the poor and/or needy. And the bulk of non-profits (churches, colleges, museums, etc.) are aimed at helping people who don't need the help to begin with.

So if you want to see whether conservatives are helping the poor, look at their policies on taxes, health care, and education, not at their relatively insignificant and misdirected charitable donations. Conservatives want to make taxes more regressive, eliminate what health care safety nets we have and move further towards a survival-of-the-richest system, and let rich families withdraw from public schools (vouchers), leaving the poor to fend for themselves.

Donor pressure mostly. There's also more here, but I've only seen the author speak; I haven't read the book.

I brought it up because the implication in the article is that only genuine altruism should be attempted. I don't think that's a good reason. The problem with welfare is that the money is dirty, not that it doesn't come from the heart.