On Sunday, the local paper ran a front page story about how $4.6M in charitable contributions was spent. It was only news because of the way some of that money was distributed to the beneficiaries.
In the aftermath of the sixth-largest loss of life for firefighters in U.S. history, millions of dollars in donations came pouring in from around the country. The donations, big and small, were meant for the surviving families of the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots, an elite group of firefighters who died in a wildfire near Yarnell, Arizona in 2013.
According to the investigative report by the Arizona Republic’s Robert Anglen, “One of the key organizations responsible for managing those donations now questions how some of the money was used, with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on sightseeing trips, high-end restaurants and hotels for hotshots’ families.”
My point in mentioning this head-shaking story is not to pick on the surviving families who as Anglen points out, “did nothing wrong in accepting the donations.” Or is it to unnecessarily dwell upon what amounts to a pretty embarrassing and disastrous public relations snafu for the charities and their management. The paper’s investigative story does all of that and then some.
It’s merely to highlight once again one of life’s most sacred and unhappy truths. The easiest money to spend is always somebody else’s.
Milton Friedman
I’ve known this all my life. And it’s one of the principal reasons that organizational, business and government transparency and the lack thereof aggravates and animates me so much. As a matter of fact, it is one of the two key drivers of my quest to reform mandatory bar associations. You don’t get any more high-handed and cavalier in spending somebody else’s compulsory dues money than the tin-eared bureaucrats running our nation’s mandatory bar associations.
The other energizer is of course, reclaiming and protecting the First Amendment freedoms of lawyers, which like the Constitutional rights of all Americans are being eroded everyday.
As for transparency and “on whom money is spent,” Nobel prize-winning economist, the late Milton Friedman said it best some 36-years ago in Free to Choose co-authored with his wife, Rose.
Friedman knew that if it’s someone else’s money — there’s no accountability and no real consequences as to how that money is spent.
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Credits: money, at Morguefile, no attribution; “WTF,” by ulricaloeb at Flickr Creative Commons attribution license; Portrait of Milton Friedman by Robert Hannah 89, The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice via Wikipedia, public domain; chart via Youtube video.
