Volunteerism as I understand it, is a way of compensating for economic or social failure. If you have an economy that impoverishes land and people, as now, then decency will try to compensate by various kinds of volunteerism. But the only effective answer to economic destruction is a better economy - an economy that takes proper care of things, as an economy is supposed to do. 

The idea of the current crop of "conservatives" - that government can cater to greed and leave charity to volunteers - is vicious, and it can't work. The "liberal" idea - that the failures of greedy and wasteful economy can be effectively patched by government services and regulations - is also helpless. There is no way to get a good result from an economy that institutionalizes greed as an honorable motive and excuses waste and destruction as "acceptable."    from Conversations With Wendell Berry, page 179

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