On April 7, 2024, Mitchell West was arrested for handing out free burritos to the hungry. While West and other members of a local charity distributed food to impoverished community members in the courthouse square in Dayton, Ohio, a police officer approached and told them to stop. West doled out one last burrito. The officer placed him in handcuffs. 

　　In Dayton, no one can share food with the hungry without the government’s permission. It doesn’t matter that West’s charity complies with the same food safety standards as the restaurants in Dayton or that it cleans up trash before and after each service. Because the city requires a separate permit for each six-hour increment, even a shoestring charity like West’s would have to pay hundreds of dollars in fees each year. 

　　There are many explanations for why Dayton might criminalize charity. Safetyism is one. Because something could go wrong—a beneficiary might get an upset stomach from a suspicious burrito—oversight is necessary. As Dayton’s mayor unselfconsciously put it, “You just can’t have people running around in public spaces like that, just giving stuff without having any sets of rules.” A more cynical explanation is that the town wants to suppress public attention on its homelessness problem. 

　　But there’s a deeper pathology at work, one that pervades our fragmented cultural landscape: the displacement of civil society by the state. The same dynamic plays out across all strata of society, from FEMA allegedly blocking and seizing private aid sent in response to Hurricane Helene to, in my hometown in Virginia, the county forcibly dissolving a local volunteer fire department. 

　　The urge to monopolize is only human, and government is a human institution made up of human beings. Like other institutions, it seeks to defend its prerogatives and expand its sphere of influence. And like other individuals, the people who work in government seek to protect their jobs. 

　　The political incentives to supplant private charity with government welfare are clear. When people are beholden to benefits provided by the government, they are beholden to the politicians and bureaucrats responsible for those benefits. Dependency is a political asset. 

　　As the great chronicler of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, remarked: “The more” the government “stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are causes and effects which unceasingly engender each other.” It is no coincidence that Americans donate seven times as much per capita to charity as their welfare-state cousins in Europe. 

　　Private actors can also be troublesome competitors. One meta-analysis comparing the effectiveness of public agencies and private institutions found that the latter performed better in 56 of 71 studies. And while the government spends 70 percent of aid money on bureaucracy and 30 percent on actual recipients, private entities spend the inverse. It’s threatening when someone else can do your job more effectively and efficiently. 

　　Private entities are a threat to governmental hegemony on a more fundamental level, too. They represent concentrations of money, power, and influence outside state control. As Hillary Clinton put it with charming directness, without censorship of social media companies, “we lose total control.” The natural impulse of government is to expand and flatten the social landscape. 

　　The story of the twentieth century is, in many ways, the story of government dissolving the ties that bind. From the Founding, voluntary associations were a unique and inescapable characteristic of American life. They were diverse and frequently local, ranging from the ethnic (like the Scots’ Charitable Society) to the hyper-specific (like the Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, founded to promote rescue from near-death situations). 

　　We need other power centers to keep the state in check, restrain its worst impulses, and preserve spaces of privacy and independence.

　　The law protected these undertakings. The First Amendment explicitly recognizes “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” And the right to use one’s property for charitable endeavors is deeply rooted in both the American and English legal traditions.

　　The modern era, by contrast, has witnessed stark atomization. Although that trend has many causes—from television to declining religious faith—the government has been at the vanguard. Government programs have largely supplanted the charitable function of mutual benefit associations that previously supplied a safety net to their members. And coercive regulations have suppressed voluntary association. Some of those regulations, like COVID-19 lockdowns, are obvious. But others, like vague state neglect laws that prohibit children from playing in public spaces unsupervised, are so pervasive they can seem invisible.

　　This dynamic has devastated the vitality of American culture. Individuals derive meaning from helping others and joining with them to make common cause. The destruction of those bonds has hollowed out private life and left individuals isolated and starved for meaning. We have gone from a people rich in connection with our fellow citizens to bare individuals trapped in a sterile, monogamous relationship with the state.The data bear this point out: rates of social isolation have increased alongside a spike in mental health diagnoses.

　　State monopolies have crowded out other, often better, solutions to social problems. Because civil society is decentralized, it draws on the knowledge of local conditions possessed by everyday Americans, who collectively wield a far greater store of knowledge than centralized bureaucrats can hold in their heads.Researchhas suggested, for example, that civil society provided more effective disaster recovery following Hurricane Katrina than did top-down bureaucratic interventions.

　　Private charity also promotes mutual reciprocity in a way that government programs do not, by embedding participants in a web of norms, obligations, and face-to-face interactions. Outsourcing charity to the government alienates people from their moral obligations to their fellow citizens. And when your neighbor is the one lending a helping hand, it is far harder to take advantage—and far easier to be grateful.

　　Most fundamentally, the diffusion of authority is critical to preserving freedom. It’s hard to be free when the state is the only place to turn in a moment of need. And independent institutions can speak out against the state and mount a defense when it overreaches in a way that isolated private individuals simply cannot. We need other power centers to keep the state in check, restrain its worst impulses, and preserve spaces of privacy and independence. None of that is possible if we exist only as atomized individuals naked before the power of the state.

　　Burrito confiscation in Dayton may seem like a small thing. That is exactly the point: civil society is grassroots. It arises from the innumerable micro-interactions of private people pursuing public ends every day, often face to face. Given space to grow, it makes for a flourishing, purposeful culture. But civil society is fragile, and the state is a jealous master. We need to grasp that dynamic before we forget what it is like to look a fellow human being in the eye and give him sustenance.