On the other hand there is competition between nonprofits, plus they are often multinational.
I find it interesting that some of the most efficient government organizations (like World Food Programme) actually operate as charities (in the sense that everyone can donate to them).
I'm not sure what you're comparing here. Are you saying governments are more efficient because they are bigger? Are you saying they are more efficient because they've filled a need more completely?
The first is non-sense and the second is more a function of size and power than efficiency. Efficiency is about benefit per dollar, and governments are really really bad a that, typically making up for how bad they are by simply throwing more dollars at the problem.
That is, I can be 100% efficient with my donation to charity by just...giving $20 to a homeless person. Oh look, 100% of my donation went to someone in need. A charity can be 90% efficient by collecting and distributing donations citywide; it's more widespread, and donations are less centralized, but there's cost in paying people to actually do the legwork. A government is doing stuff nationwide, distributing unequally based on need (measured in a flawed way, yes, but still requiring measurement, since it's politically untenable to do simple things), and is less efficient still. But that's...to be expected.
You see the same thing in private sector; the larger a company is, the less efficiently it runs. Walmart is the largest private employer; no one is claiming it's a well oiled machine of efficiencies comparable to a lean startup. Necessarily; it's just like with technology, the more distributed the system is, the less efficient it is. Saying that governments are inefficient and just throw money at the problem is like saying distributed systems are inefficient and just throw compute at the problem. While true, it nevertheless is still the only way to solve many problems at that scale, and comparing the 'inefficiencies' of hardware of, say, Google, to the hardware for local search on my home PC, isn't particularly meaningful rhetoric.
This is definitely not an ideological and dogmatic statement obscuring centuries of experience across hundreds of government systems, oh no-no-no. Government is bad at everything, get it?
> There are no examples in the history of the world of charity sufficiently providing for the needs of the poor at a national scale.
This is just false. Literally right now we have the case where food banks are filling in the gaps of the UK government at a national scale.
There are plenty of inefficiencies in businesses too. I don't understand how anyone who has ever worked for a small or medium-sized company can complain about government waste. Almost every job I've had has been just riddled with ludicrous inefficiencies.
> plus they operate like monopolies.
Every philanthropist has a monopoly on the use of their funds.
At least with tax-supported government programs, voters have representation on how those funds are used.
And there are lots of them, not operating all under one central control, so they are likely to help local needs, compete in other spaces, and spread the effects.
> At least with tax-supported government programs, voters have representation on how those funds are used.
And then those funds are mostly sent to a big few items taxpayers hear about and not so much to any other needs.
Voters also have representation on how charity funds are spent, since voters are the people making donations. If anything, this means your funds target what you want instead of what others want you to spend on.
