Read on Twitter
Saw a tweet about less government services and more volunteerism and it’s been on my mind. It highlights the lack of knowledge about social services.
Almost every place I have worked has also had volunteers, and their efforts were helpful and useful. But the work they did was a relatively small addition to the massive amounts of work done by paid staff.
And there is no way the needs of the people being served could have been met through volunteerism alone. The work we do requires knowledge, training and amounts of time that cannot be obtained simply through volunteerism.
More than that, this is employment! We want people to be employed, right? Not on welfare? What do you think would happen if you cut off government funding? Would we all find jobs in Bridge-building? IT? Not likely.
If you took away the livelihood of millions of people whose jobs you don’t think the government should compensate, those millions of people could not be easily employed elsewhere. You want them to do their job equivalent for free?
Smaller government sounds so good until you try to figure out whose job is unnecessary and then find out that they are serving an important purpose that volunteers could not, or maybe would not. And why should people go unpaid for doing good and necessary work in society?
