From a free market principle, doesn’t giving your time for free for what is clearly of a lot value send the wrong incentives to organizations who are paid (whether by tax payers or patients) to deliver the value you’re giving away
One of which provides free in-school dental care for rural children, regardless of insurance or nationality. The grant funding ran out years ago and the non-profit has been funding thousands of dental treatments out of its reserves - which is obviously quite expensive.
All of this is to say I was tasked with creating and running a fundraising campaign with a budget of $300 - to raise funds for a 6 figure annual expense. My budget is so small because all of the other budget went to child dental wellness.
It's a multi-week campaign and if I brought on incremental labor costs with each volunteer - I would be in gross violation of minimum wage laws and sink the non-profit due to the minimal resources available.
That's a great service.
This is often because they serve segments of the population that represent a small demographic, or because the causes they champion don’t enjoy mainstream support.
There are some organizations that abuse volunteers, but they are few and far between (but are treated as typical, when folks want to attack).
Also, when you pay for work, you get work, but there’s no guarantee of “heart.” In many cases, the emotional investment is worth far more than the financial worth.
I’ve been doing volunteer work for over 40 years. Much of it has been extremely valuable tech work, and much of that work has been treated in rather shabby fashion. When people get stuff for free, they often devalue it. This is common, in nonprofit work. It can certainly be maddening.
I do it anyway. I tend to think of the final end-users of my work, as opposed to the middlemen/women (BTW: volunteering is a great way to meet potential romantic interests -I don’t care; I’m married).
It seems we have different ways of looking at the world.
It doesn’t reduce efficiency because the volunteers are the judge of worth and their’s is the only opinion that matters. The cost of providing services can be quite low when the labor is volunteered, so the cost to benefit tilts heavily in the direction of net benefit, i.e. efficiency in producing positive outcomes at a particular cost.
> doing it for free distorts the economy
It's very noble of you to do stuff for "the economy". Most just pursue selfish needs and desires like food, clothing, shelter, and wanting to make a difference in others' lives.
You can't just transform a volunteer to a person working for half the salary of the employed person next to him.
Free market doesn’t work when people have no personal interest on something and in itself promotes individualism.
So free market doesn’t care about people who suffer so much they become a burden to the economy.
And that’s for any suffering, not only pain : you can be of no interest for free markets if you are poor, sick, isolated, homeless, if your country is at war, under influence, constrained, abused or just unlucky …
Free markets can fulfill most of the human needs by transforming money from and into goods and services but if there is something it’s not going to do, it’s to care.
It’s an issue because humans naturally cares about things and other humans and that’s how our societies aren’t collapsing everyday.
But the capitalist system, for all its proven goods, also inherently promotes individualism and demotes caring of the world and people around.
Volunteers are doing the important hard work that free market and politics won’t do.
All of this could probably be avoided in a perfect democracy but a perfect democracy will never happen and would anyway live in an imperfect world.