> any system for distributing money to people is going to be ... bureaucratic.
Nope. Private charities like churches are not bureaucratic. They distribute money to people based on personal knowledge of those people and a personal judgment on the part of the church community that those people deserve charity.
> You claim that the bureaucracies are bloated, but have no evidence that the things they do can be achieved with less bureaucracy.
Many of the things that bloated government bureaucracies do should not be done at all. So it's pointless to ask for evidence that they could be done with less bureaucracy.
> Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich
That's what we are led to believe. I just don't think it's actually true. A whole new mess of regulations got put in place after the crash of 2008. Yet the rich are even richer now than they were then.
> Many of the things that bloated government bureaucracies do should not be done at all.
Just delete "government" and I might agree with you. On the other hand, even though I largely agree with the content of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs", I think that actually the onus is on those who claim "it doesn't need to be done" to explain one or both of (a) how we ended up with "the doing" in the first place (b) what happens when we get rid of "the doing"
When I said "Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich", I did not mean to imply that they were always effective. However, I also did not mean to imply that they exited to limit the wealth of the rich, merely their power. Particularly in the USA, the concept of seeking to limit wealth accumulation seems to be an anathema to a sizable chunk of the population. Seeking to limit power does not, as naive as this might be.
Regarding churches, I and millions of other people categorically reject systems of aid and redistribution that are based on the personal moral judgement of a handful of people. The bureaucracies we've tried to replace that with do not always do quite what we intended (by a number of different metrics), but they do at least attempt to be (more) value neutral than private charity.
It's easy to create a dewy-eyed view of small, personally-connected communities where things are done "based on personal knowledge of those people". Big cities are full of people who fled that kind of society - the judgement, xenophobia, myopia, and expectations.
Nope. Private charities like churches are not bureaucratic. They distribute money to people based on personal knowledge of those people and a personal judgment on the part of the church community that those people deserve charity.
> You claim that the bureaucracies are bloated, but have no evidence that the things they do can be achieved with less bureaucracy.
Many of the things that bloated government bureaucracies do should not be done at all. So it's pointless to ask for evidence that they could be done with less bureaucracy.
> Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich
That's what we are led to believe. I just don't think it's actually true. A whole new mess of regulations got put in place after the crash of 2008. Yet the rich are even richer now than they were then.