Why lefties hate crowdfunding

Crowdfunding: It's everywhere these days and has become all the rage when it comes to financing any project, purchase, or expense you can possibly imagine. Need money to pay your bills? Go online and create a crowdfunding campaign. Need money to get your business started? Go online and create a crowdfunding campaign. Need cash to bolster a charity cause? Go online and create a crowdfunding campaign. Famous television personalities – like "Reading Rainbow's" Levar Burton and the cast of Mystery Science Theater – turned to crowdfunding to finance revivals of their most popular shows. Entrepreneurs have turned to crowdfunding to finance consumer products like the Wave eBike. But as vast in scope as some crowdfunding campaigns have been, many more are remarkably mundane. They range from things like financing children's educational trips to funding the publication of independent novels to everything in between.

Occasionally, they are also used as political footballs.

We'll get to that. First, let's talk about the scope of crowdfunding. According to CrowdExpert.com, the global crowdfunding industry raised about $34 billion in 2015. That's an amazing amount of money raised just by asking the general public to pay for something voluntarily. Businessloans.com says that by the end of 2014, crowdfunding had added 270,000 jobs and injected more than $65 billion into the global economy. Perhaps not surprisingly, consumer tech products – which represent the gadgets that affluent consumer-investors are most likely to buy – were the best performers across crowdfunding campaigns. But less than half of projects posted to the crowdfunding site Kickstarter made their funding goals; as of 2012, the global crowdfunding success rate was about 50 percent.

To date, no one formula for crowdfunding success has been found. Some campaigns succeed because they have a viral marketing "hook." Others succeed simply because the public wants them badly (such as the "Reading Rainbow" revival, which met and exceeded its goal very quickly). But increasingly, we are seeing crowdfunding used not to finance new business ventures or even political or populist causes, but to deal with the expenses of day to day life. These include things like medical or veterinary bills, credit card debts and, most recently, the expenses incurred by rape victims.

This is where the political football starts to be tossed around. The Daily Dot, which purports to be "the ultimate destination for original reporting on Internet culture and life online," is in reality little better than a pop-culture mouthpiece for liberal sensibilities. Popular culture has long leaned left, and the Daily Dot is no exception. Quite the contrary, in fact; it is the figurehead on a doomed vessel carried on the hot winds of social justice whiners' braying. Recently, the publication's Lyz Lenz sniffed that "Rape victims are now having to crowdfund hospital bills." On the Daily Dot's Facebook page, whoever posted the article added the commentary, "This is not OK."

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"Rape victims are often encouraged to go to the emergency room for a rape kit and examination," writes Lenz, "which can lead to bills in the tens of thousands [of dollars]. And even though federal law prohibits hospitals from billing rape victims for their examinations, Sarah Layden, director of advocacy services at the Chicago-based nonprofit Rape Victim Advocates, told the Chicago Tribune last year that many hospitals still send patients the bill. … Even if hospitals adhere to such mandates, the federal law doesn't cover all expenses. Rape victims may still end up paying for treatments of injuries sustained from the rape, plus emergency contraception and medications to prevent or treat HIV infections and other STIs, according to NPR."

Lenz goes on to recount the case of Tilisha Thomas, who was stabbed while fighting off a rapist last summer. Thomas raised over $12,000 for her recovery (and presumably bills related to that recovery). Another victim cited by Lewnz, Tammers Benson, has raised $8,000. Lenz quotes the victims' quite earnest belief that the outpouring of public financial support helped not only to alleviate their financial burdens, but also provide emotional support in time of crisis.

There's nothing wrong with any of that. In fact, it's quite laudable. We live in a dangerous world where sexual assaults occur. When a victim crowdfunds to cover medical or court expenses incurred as a result of a sexual assault, this gives the local community – and the wider community of interested parties across the Internet – a means of showing their support. Many of us, in fact, donate to crowdfunding campaigns specifically because there is very little else we can do, substantively and materially, to support a cause we believe in. Crowdfunding allows the public to "vote with its wallet," supporting those projects, political actions, and people it finds worthwhile.

So what about that is "not OK," exactly?

The implication is clear. As a left-wing mouthpiece, the Daily Dot never fails to propagandize for Democrats, for socialists and for government control of the population at large. In the world of the Daily Dot's contributors, America is a horrible place ruled by patriarchy and misogyny, by micro-aggressions and the refusal to use preferred pronouns. It is a "rape culture" where rape victims are first violated by everything from the "male gaze" to movies whose stars are too "heterosexually virile" (commentary that appeared in Vanity Fair, a fellow traveler to the Daily Dot). Obviously, according to the Daily Dot's editorial slant, rape victims' medical bills should be "free." It's only the decent thing to do.

The problem with being generous with other people's money is that eventually, as the old saying goes, you run out of other people's money. Doctors and nurses are not slaves to the state. They are not the property of the public. A medical professional deserves to be compensated for his work and for his time just like any other laborer. How, then, do we set aside special classes of "free" treatment for specific issues, and by what rationale do we demand other people pay for them? Where do the special categories stop?

Crowdfunding is the perfect venue for supporting everyone from rape victims to entrepreneurs. It is powerful, it has long reach, and most importantly, it is voluntary. This, of course, is why the liberals hate it. Crowdfunding for any cause most certainly is OK – and it should remain so.

Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].