Government Didn't Always "Build That"
Karl Zinsmeister explains in the WSJ that, private citizens' charitable groups took on the nation's social problems in the past.

As the subhead puts it, "The classic American virtues were inculcated by philanthropy--and modern reformers can do the same":

Savvy cultural leaders, businessmen, preachers and citizens built philanthropic groups that targeted everything from illiteracy to poverty to moral decay. Men and women, like New York merchants Arthur and Lewis Tappan, launched thousands of energetic charitable groups that collectively became known as the Benevolent Empire. These new charities took on America's toughest problems.

• A vast movement to encourage voluntary temperance led by grassroots volunteers who were disproportionately women, as well as pastors and business leaders concerned about the workforce, chopped alcohol consumption to 2.6 gallons per capita from 7.5 gallons, according to U.S. Census data. This was before the government intervened with ill-fated Prohibition edicts.

• Sunday schools provided free literacy instruction and moral training to the half of U.S. children who received no formal schooling at that time.

• Legions of donors and volunteers, including the Tappan brothers, employed a blend of direct mail, legal defense, religious appeal and mass persuasion to make slavery odious to a large group of Americans for the first time, a generation before the government intervened.

• Charitable interventions from groups like the YMCA and American Sunday School Union healed cultural fractures, crime and community breakdown that were the result of immigration, industrialization and migration from small towns to big cities.

• Civil-society campaigns like the Chautauqua movement turned self improvement and continuing education into deep national habits.

We may think of sobriety, industriousness, thrift, neighborliness, self-discipline and truthfulness as classic American virtues, but they were far from universal before philanthropic reformers went to work. American philanthropy today is still capable of leading important alterations in society. Many examples already exist.

The most successful school reforms of the last two decades--charter schools, improved teacher assessment, new digital-learning options, Teach for America and the best STEM programs--were all sparked by philanthropy.

For urgent needs like job training, helping immigrants assimilate, repairing broken families, moving the homeless into the workforce, and fighting drug addiction, today's most effective programs are voluntary efforts run by charitable organizations like the Doe Fund, Habitat for Humanity, Goodwill Industries, and thousands of other grassroots groups. They work because what happens in our hearts, homes and interactions with neighbors are often more effective in shaping the nation than most of what happens in politics or policy.

The problem is that so many people have gotten so dependent on government doing things that need to be done, they take for granted that this is The Way.

Charter Schools are the best modern evidence I see that citizens -- moms and dads who want a good education for their children -- can make a difference where government cannot.

It also creates community when people in an area work together to solve problems in that area. I've seen this in my own neighborhood, with a group of incredible neighbors I'm a part of, working to deal with some problems here. We became real neighbors -- far more so than when we just lived here and weren't working together.

An example of what citizens together can do from "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck":

• Band together and take over for lame-ass government.
When government is failing you, don't sit on your collective hands. Consider doing as a bunch of people did in Hawaii.

When Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources didn't have the $4 million it estimated it would take to fix an access road to Kauai's Polihale State Park, local businesses and residents banded together and fixed it themselves.

Mallory Simon reported on CNN.com that Ivan Slack of Napali Kayak, who needs the park open to keep his company's doors open, donated resources. Other businesses and residents rounded up machinery and manpower, and together they completed $4 million in roadwork for free in eight days.