Much philanthropy is a routinized exchange between salaried bureaucrats

Which is not to say you shouldn't help people. It is to say that the best way to help may not be registered and legislated charity. Mutual aid is a powerful thing - you can enable communities around you to be self-determining, rather than funding a bunch of salaried assholes to decide what they need.

Go find a mutual aid organization near you. Set up a big chunky recurring contribution. And if you're feeling intrepid, get to know some of the people and learn how you can help out on the ground.

Comparing government's and private charities' efficiency at delivering help is a perfectly rational comparison to make when deciding which things should or should not be delivered by the government. The government's efficiency is always a concern when talking about it taking on new responsibilities.

If government efficiency was moot, why not have them handle delivery/allocation of all basic goods? We know that's a bad idea because the experiment has been run, and private industry is better as producing and distributing food because.... efficiency.

Feels like an arbitrary distinction to what I said. "Efficiency" is an axis that doesn't make sense when the scale and scope are massively different, for all the reasons mentioned above.

>> We know that's a bad idea because the experiment has been run

So many issues with this. First, your claim is "Efficiency is about benefit per dollar, and governments are really really bad a(t) that"; you make a claim about all governments. Cherry picking data points is not helping that claim; you have to show that government is never, and can never, be more efficient than private industry. I'm pointing out why even trying to make the comparison at national scale is difficult. Second, where has this example occurred? Again, I think your choice of data points is telling.

Food is actually a super interesting example where, again, the scale of the operation doesn't really make for direct comparison. Grocery stores are obviously the way consumers get access to food, but their stock happens via multiple wholesale distributors, who themselves are middle men between multiple suppliers. That is, while Ralphs/Kroger/King Soupers/etc may be as near a nationwide grocery store in the US as I'm aware of, they're stocked by Sysco, US Foods, etc (who are carrying multiple, sometimes even competing, brands), as well as sometimes specific distributors for a large enough company (Coke may have their own, for instance), and who transport product between warehouses using separate longhaul trucking companies, etc etc. There is a LOT of inefficiency involved in that, a lot of middle men collecting along the way, and as we saw during the pandemic, a lot of places the supply chain can break down. And you're comparing it to...what? Russia during peak communism? The closest the US has had is when the government got involved during WWII with rationing, and that actually worked really well, given the shortages we had.

Let's try going the other way, and scaling government down. I too will cherry pick some data - municipal broadband. Oh, wow, now we have something way more efficient than 'the free market', even without tax subsidies, in every market it exists in; so much so that the only way private industry can compete is via legislation to prevent municipal broadband from expanding.

I think accountable means that when I give someone money, they should use my money for what I want, and you think accountable means that when I give someone money, they should use my money for what you want.

Everyone wants to donate to program work, but never to operations.

Even grants that carve out for operations aren’t always realistic.

Major gifts is one of the best ways to get unrestricted donor funds.

You can get a lot of information from the 990 filing of an organization.

In other comments, I agree that in many non profit organizations there are people who might not last in for profit.

Most of those people however are working in roles that are $30,000 , maybe $40,000 a year and there wouldn’t be someone in for profit who would take that role, for that amount of pay.

Overwork and burnout in the field is very real.

Unrelated to that staffing, I would again go back to operational expenses - rent, electricity, payroll etc. Depending on the nonprofit, this may be a huge percentage… but if you have an organization that has a $250,000 a year revenue, two staff to accomplish what their mission is…. What actually goes to program work might be very little.