George Melloan last June in the Wall Street Journal:
Most [non-governmental organizations] see it as their mission to do good works, as opposed to spreading mayhem. They are part of a vast non-profit (or ostensibly so) private sector that is growing rapidly. Americans give some $240 billion a year to private charities and a like amount in volunteer services, if you value the time they devote based on the hourly earnings of production workers. According to a publication called Independent Sector, the growth rate of employment in the non-profit sector between 1997 and 2001 was significantly greater than that in private business or government. It reported that non-profit employment has doubled in the last 25 years and now represents 9.5% of the U.S. work force....In a new book titled "How to Change the World" (Oxford University Press) David Bornstein quotes Peter Goldmark, a former president of the Rockefeller Foundation: "It's got to strike you that a quarter of a century ago outside the United States, there were very few NGOs and now there are millions of them all over the globe." ...He adds later in the book that "the spread of democracy and the emergence of a vigorous citizen sector over the past 30 years has opened up extraordinary opportunities. . . the citizen sector is going through changes that are comparable to those that occurred in the business sector over the past three centuries."
The United Nations' standing as a vestige of failed 20th-Century totalistic social and administrative architecture could not be more clear, its feckless yet politically obnoxious response to the southern Asian and Orient tsunami disaster contrasted starkly to the silent running of NGOs fueled by small, private donations. And the United Nations' unelected leaders, caretakers of Saddam Hussein's world-class swindle, are as cunning as they are unhelpful. Wretchard of Belmont Club has much, much, much more.