A healthy proportion of local American hospitals were set up and later expanded through many, many rounds of charitable proto-crowdfunding in the first place.

A healthy proportion of local American hospitals were set up and later expanded through many, many rounds of charitable proto-crowdfunding in the first place. Fraternal (Shriners), ones with Saint in the name, and so on.[0] Credit unions were of course formed to provide local lending pools in good times and bad and to smooth out the peaks and troughs of credit availability. The phenomenon that a lot of American credit unions now advertise and compete with the capital markets (for where to get money from, or where to invest it) and with interstate banks, or that farm-credit nonprofits compete with nationwide programs, is an unanticipated and relatively recent legal development (and most interstate banking holding companies themselves are only 40-50 years old - before that, they couldn't coordinate across state lines). The wider phenomenon that it sometimes seems like "everybody with the choice to do so" is merging into the fast lane due to red tape and other incentives is partially sampling bias, but even if it's true I don't consider it to provide proof that we should get rid of any remaining slow lanes. Probably we need more specific types of slow lanes, some of which will let you switch lanes later but cost you the back taxes. There are many different nonprofit tax code section 501 types already, but I don't think that nonprofit status itself is a very well tailored conceptual solution to answer "what kind of slow lanes are useful nowadays?" There are many commons and cooperative options that are hard to shoehorn into 501(c)(3). It would be nice to have some social benefit activities protected from taxation even in otherwise-taxable cooperatives. While some American state legislatures have enacted a "Low Profit Limited Liability Corporation" or L3C status available, the first thing you learn about it is that it is no different in tax status from any other LLC. HM Government in the UK offers a CIC or Community Interest Company business model, and this requires all profits to be reinvested for the benefit of a geographical area designated by the enterprise, and has an asset lock so that its possessions cannot be distributed to shareholders, although there can be shares traded -- all of which might be steps in a promising direction. But again there is no tax exemption (partial or total) for which these social enterprises are specifically eligible. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Hospital https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Hospital