I think you could make a very similar argument about most private industries too - surely there's a lot of overhead with all the lawyers, accountants, etc not t

I think you could make a very similar argument about most private industries too - surely there's a lot of overhead with all the lawyers, accountants, etc not to mention a lot of redundancy with many companies doing the same thing. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just have the government do everything? I think the advantages of charities are along the same lines, smaller organizations can be more efficient, redundancy avoids a single point of failure, etc. Would I want to rely on charities to provide all essential services? No. But if for political reasons, the government doesn't provide some service I don't think it is a bad thing to have charities around that might be able to mitigate things somewhat. I guess the tax policy really depends on the numbers for me. If 50% of public spending is charity spending / 50% is gov. that's very high and maybe they should consider scaling back the deductions. But if it's 5% charity 95% government, I'd say leave the deduction alone since charities have a valuable purpose. This is all independent of preventing any sort of abuse which should be done first, then the remaining number could be looked at.