Important article about the slippery slope from an underpaid teacher crowdfunding for classroom supplies to a bankruptcy city crowdfunding to clean up its parks. Crowdfunding is great when it funds new products that aren’t getting supported by more conventional forms of investment:
Public necessities, by contrast, are not awesome; they’re essential. Roads, health care, education: These are not the kinds of things that go viral and raise $2 million in less than a week. But if crowdfunding for the public good is allowed to continue unchecked, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which everyone votes on public works with their dollars—distorting priorities and giving those with deeper pockets more of a say.
Of all the crowdfunding appeals I’ve come across on facebook, a solid 90% of them are for healthcare expenses (and more often than not for dire conditions, like cancer or a terminal genetic disease). This is depressing not just because healthcare is also a public good (and these appeals make clear the inadequacy of our healthcare funding structure), but because it puts people in the position of begging for money at the most desperate time in their lives. Their very survival is now hitched not just to their own healthcare-employment situation, but to the wealth of their family members, classmates, and facebook connections. I’d like to call that evil too.
Source: Crowdfunding for the Public Good Is Evil | WIRED