This week, the New York Times ran an in-depth story critical of popular charity Kiva.org. The organization, lauded in a 2007 column by Nicholas Kristof, claimed until recently to let "you lend to a specific entrepreneur, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty." Kiva connects Westerners to entrepreneurs in impoverished countries, giving them the means to make big changes in the entrepreneurs' lives with relatively small chunks of money, given as "micro-loans." Kiva purports to connect each Western lender to a specific entrepreneur-Constance, a Ghanan mother of four looking to expand her seamstress business, or Rem Sem, a Cambodian woman who wants to buy land for her farm, for instance. After an online controversy arose about whether the money given by lenders went to specific entrepreneurs, as advertised, the New York Times went into investigation mode on this charity and one other.

Lenders like Mr. Kristof were not making direct loans. Borrowers like Ms. Cruz already have loans from microfinance institutions by the time their pictures are posted on Kiva's Web site. Thus, the direct person-to-person connection Kiva offered was in fact an illusion... Kiva is not the only site with transparency problems. GlobalGiving, whose Web site allows donors to choose among various projects to support, has raised money for philanthropic projects of three or four profit-making companies, according to Dennis Whittle, its co-founder and chief executive. It did not, however, tell donors that their money would support a company's philanthropic projects rather than one proposed by a nonprofit. For instance, it raised $975 for SunNight Solar Enterprises, a small start-up that develops solar-powered consumer products, so it could distribute 500 free solar-powered lights to refugees in camps. After The New York Times raised questions about the issue, Mr. Whittle said in a blog post on The Huffington Post that GlobalGiving was considering whether to tell potential donors when it was raising money for a business rather than a nonprofit.

These are fair points. The transparency and accountability of non-profit organizations and charities is important both for the charities, to maintain confidence of potential donors, and for their missions, which are ill-served by opacity. Even though the money of lenders went to help poor entrepreneurs-there is no dispute about that-the Times thinks it's important for the charity to be honest about the fact that it didn't go to poor entrepreneurs in exactly the way advertised. The newspaper understands that money is fungible, and a promise that it will be spent in one way does not mean that those specific dollars will be spent on the specific promise. That, as it happens, is the exact argument conservatives and pro-life activists have been making about money for abortions in the health-care bill. Despite legislative language that says federal money will not be used for abortions, it's almost impossible to ensure that without the stricter language of a Stupak amendment. As my colleague John McCormack wrote:

Congress isn't requiring the public option to cover abortion--merely allowing it. And through some nifty bookkeeping, abortions will supposedly be paid for out of private funds rather than tax dollars. Because money is fungible, it's difficult to say that tax dollars wouldn't fund abortions through this plan. Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee says, "Federal subsidies would also flow to private plans that cover elective abortions, under meaningless bookkeeping schemes -- and the amendment actually creates a federal mandate that there must be at least one private abortion plan in each premium rating areas of the health insurance exchange." Say that an individual contributes $1,000 annually to purchase a health-care plan, and the government contributes $5,000. The federal subsidies are not supposed to pay directly for abortions services, but the taxpayer-subsidized plan would allow a person to purchase an abortion for, say, $50 rather than $500. "The status quo is that nobody has federally subsidized health care that includes abortion," says Johnson. That is true not only for Medicaid recipients, but federal employees as well.

But because the New York Times sees "anti-abortion" activists as paranoiacs, and the federal government as far more benevolent a force than even a charity like Kiva, it does not have the same requirements for transparency and accountability in the spending of federal tax dollars on health care. From the New York Times editorial on the Stupak amendment, which the Times deemed unnecessary:

The bill brought to the floor already included a careful compromise that should have satisfied reasonable legislators on both sides of the abortion issue. The vast majority of people expected to buy policies on the new exchanges would pay part of the premium and receive government tax credits to pay for the rest. The compromise would have prohibited the use of the tax subsidies to pay for almost all abortions, but it would have allowed the segregation and use of premium contributions and co-payments to pay for such coverage.

You see? Promise made! Different monies for different things. You'd have to be absolutely unhinged to think things could go differently than promised. It's nice that the Times reported on the discrepancy between how Kiva spent its fungible donations and the promises it made about how to spend it. Though the lack of transparency resulted in nothing very dishonorable, Kiva has now revamped its pitch and become more accountable to donors. Kiva's very existence relies on such honesty, as it must keep its good name in order to lure donors. A federal health-care program, which will be run by a slew of unaccountable bureaucrats and funded by forcibly acquired tax dollars, does not have nearly the natural mechanisms for accountability that Kiva has. And, the federal government's potential broken promises and lack of transparency in spending tax money, particularly on abortions, would be far more widespread and less benign than any transgressions Kiva could manage. If only the New York Times could be as skeptical of a $2 trillion behemoth of a health-care plan run by unelected bureaucrats armed with the power to forcibly extract funds from taxpayers and jail them when they don't comply, as it is of an organization that enables $25 loans to Afghani bakers and single moms in the Dominican Republic. Aren't you glad they're your watchdogs?