Why Helping Your Neighbor Now Requires a Government Permit

Let’s play a game of “What if?” What if a modern-day equivalent of Mother Teresa—a globally recognized Nobel laureate whose entire life is a testament to selfless charity—arrived in one of our gleaming American cities today? Not for a fundraiser or a speech, but to actually get her hands dirty caring for our most vulnerable.

She’d be stopped at the door. Not by public opposition, but by a clipboard-wielding bureaucrat citing a violation of subsection C, paragraph 4 of the local zoning code.

This isn’t a dystopian fantasy. It’s essentially what happened in the early 1990s, as detailed by Charles Colson, when the real Mother Teresa was thwarted in her mission to open a home for the destitute dying in New York City. The reason? Not a lack of funds, will, or need. The city government decreed her facility needed a $50,000 elevator. For an order of nuns who had vowed to carry the sick and dying in their own arms, as they did in the slums of Calcutta, the demand was not just financially absurd; it was morally incomprehensible. The mission failed. The homeless lost a refuge. And the city’s bureaucracy, in its infinite wisdom, protected the vulnerable from the grave danger of being carried upstairs by a saint.

This is a perfect, infuriating parable of the bureaucratic mindset. But here’s the kicker: if anything, the situation he described has worsened since Mother Teresa’s passing in 1997. The regulatory state has not shrunk; it has metastasized. The rulebooks have thickened, the permitting processes have lengthened, and the “professionalization” of compassion has only accelerated.

The core conflict identified here is not between caring and not caring. It’s between two entirely different operating systems for compassion:

The Bureaucratic Model: Compassion is a program. It is administered, not lived. Its primary virtues are efficiency, uniformity, and liability mitigation. Its goal is measurable output. Its heart is a checklist. It demands elevators because that’s what the code says, and the code is its scripture.

The Charitable Model: Compassion is a mission. It is personal, sacrificial, and often messy. Its primary virtue is love. Its goal is the restoration of human dignity. Its heart is a servant. It sees a person who needs help, not a case file that needs processing.

The tragedy occurs when System 1 uses its immense power to veto System 2. It doesn’t do this out of malice, but out of a robotic, procedural inertia. The bureaucrat isn’t evil; they’re just doing their job. And that’s precisely the problem. Their job is to enforce rules, not to exercise wisdom. The result is what economists call the “crowding out” effect: government, with its endless regulations and state-funded alternatives, doesn’t just supplement private charity; it suffocates it.

Why would a small church group navigate a months-long zoning battle to open a soup kitchen when they can just donate to a United Way campaign that funnels money into a city-run shelter? Why would a passionate individual risk personal liability to mentor at-risk youth when they could be required to obtain a state certification first? The answer is, most don’t. The path of least resistance is to let the professionals handle it. And thus, the muscle of voluntary, community-based charity atrophies.

This leads to a society that is, paradoxically, both over-governed and under-loved. We have more social programs than ever, yet our streets are filled with the homeless and our souls are filled with a sense of helpless distance from the problems around us. We’ve outsourced mercy. We donate online and feel we’ve done our part, wondering why the needle never seems to move.

So, what’s the solution? It starts with a radical shift in perspective.

We must champion permission-less goodness. This doesn’t mean anarchy; it means creating streamlined, common-sense pathways for faith-based and community groups to operate. It means governments adopting “charity waivers” or “compassion zones” where the red tape is cut for proven, low-risk charitable endeavors. It means valuing human effort over physical infrastructure.

Furthermore, we must personally refuse to be bureaucratized. Instead of assuming a problem is for “the city” or “the government” to handle, we need to ask, “What can I do? What can my church do? What can my community group do?” The goal isn’t to reject all regulation, rules are necessary, but to reject the mindset that a rulebook is more important than the good it is supposed to facilitate.

Mother Teresa’s work in Calcutta didn’t require an elevator. It required courage, love, and a willingness to get close to suffering. That is the one thing bureaucracy can never mandate, and the very thing it often prevents. The greatest poverty isn’t a lack of money or elevators; it’s a lack of love. And that is a deficit no government program can ever fix.