Government policy toward nonprofits will have a far greater effect than charitable giving. A big chuck of government payments to nonprofits are Medicare and Medicaid payments and other service contracts, so I do not think these will be affected.* *WS* and *In terms of funding, imo the most objectionable part of the rise of non profits is the extent to which they provide services the government should be providing itself. Governmental agencies are, at least in theory, much more amenable to popular will than non profits governed as, they often are, by all powerful executive directors and self selecting boards of directors. SR
*Does anyone know of an effort to theorize these developments at the national level? Has anyone argued, for example, that the use of non-profits rather than government agencies is a response to efforts in the 1960s and 70s to democratize state bureaucracies? That the use of non-profits is, in fact, a strategy for depoliticizing the state?
The kind of state theory I was taught focused on the formal equivalence of "democratic" ballots and dollars in the electoral and commodity "markets" and the "undemocratic" character of government bureaucracy and commodity production. Here, the Old Left was most clearly defined by efforts to democratize production and the New Left by efforts to democratize the bureaucratic state (and New Social Movements by efforts to democratize civil society)... all do far more but, as a first stab at what makes these always-overlapping trajectories different, this has felt like it has served me well.
Continuing to think out loud, the use of non-profits to provide public services could then be seen as an (admittedly imperfect) parallel to monopoly capitalist strategies for turning once-internal units into external suppliers. Does this ring any bells? I'm sure it has all sorts of limits but is it worth exploring?