The Nonprofit Industrial Complex
Here is something to make you think. It's by Gerard Alexander and is in the Weekly Standard. He focuses on universities and foundations, but he could have added in almost 300,000 residential private governments.

Western countries have already been transformed by industrialization, the rise of the service sector, and the growth of big government. The result has been wealthy economies, middle-class societies, and vast bureaucracies. Our country might now be transformed again by the spread of what Richard Cornuelle dubbed the "independent sector." The growth of nonprofits--from the Getty Museum to Seattle's Children's Hospital, Emory University, and your aunt's country club--has created the world's largest sector that is neither business fish nor government fowl. It has the private sector's diversity and independence but the government's lack of a profit motive. It is a different way of doing business. It may be a different way of making a country. But is it a wholesome one?