The Third Sector is the “third way” between the state and its public institutions and the market. Voluntary, social, and philanthropic organisations contribute to the provision of public goods. They do so without seeking financial gain; they do not distribute profits to their owners; the financial surplus is reinvested in their civic mission.
In 1965, Richard Cornuelle, a political activist, charity worker, author, and one of the first modern American libertarians, coined the term “Independent Sector,” a more meaningful term than the “Third Sector,” arguing that private and voluntary interventions can be powerful mechanisms for achieving social change. Unrestrained by government control, even though it receives public funding, and guided by social, environmental, and cultural values, the Independent Sector arises from a spontaneous order among people left free to perform social tasks to solve their own problems at the local level more effectively than the bureaucratic order. The latter is desired by party culture. It demands that the public sector be burdened with ever-growing responsibilities that require ever more money, obtained by increasing taxation and public debt. Satisfying the hunger for public funds increases the power wielded by political parties in selecting ever-growing interventions for their electorates. Doing more with more leads to poor quality, inefficiencies, and failures. Conversely, the Independent Sector, by doing more with less, effectively manages education, poverty alleviation, and other social functions.
Volunteering, social advancement, and philanthropy will flourish if a cultural revolution occurs within public administration. Rigid rules, obstacles, and bureaucratic requirements, often designed for corporate structures, not volunteering, remain significant. These obstacles impede the implementation of experimental management approaches that foster highly effective creative environments. Excessive public bureaucracy, combined with party politics, especially stifles voluntary associations that engage in cultural activities. Unfortunately, it happens that the voluntary self-organisation of culture is subjugated, or decides to submit, to a higher-ranking public authority that puts its own ideology and survival before the spontaneity of the community’s cultural life. This is eroded by the authority that was supposed to sustain it. At best, the cultural association is reduced to a service provider, losing its spontaneity, autonomy, and ability to influence policymakers to generate change.
Ultimately, the public administration’s willingness and ability to innovate in the structure and management of organisational processes, decision-making models, and resource allocation methods to give breathing space to the Independent Sector, conceived by Richard Cornuelle, is questionable. What we see is resistance to change that punctures the innovation ball. Will we continue to manage the Third Sector’s past, or will the public sector’s unwillingness to push back against outdated ideas, against the mental disorder of adding procedures, regulations, and administrative practices, disappear to build a future known as the Independent Sector, born from a spontaneous order based on individual initiative and personal responsibility rather than the responsibilities of bureaucratic hierarchies that impose a crushing handshake on the Third Sector? By shining a spotlight on the Independent Sector, we will understand just how generous the patronising hand of the wealthy will be.
