Generosity

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 8: Generosity

• Stop trying to explain American generosity apart from good-heartedness.  We can conjure up a thousand arguments about what might cause people to be generous.  They all fail the sniff test of human nature and human history.  It’s always been possible to find a few generous rich people.  Until America, it wasn’t possible to find a society full of generous people.

People generally either give because they have a spiritually driven sense of caring for others, or they don’t give at all.  If Darwin is all you’ve got, you’ve got every incentive to preserve every dollar for yourself.  Not much will be accomplished by relying on what Al Gore called “hollow secularism” for our giving.[i]  If charity isn’t driven from within each individual, if it isn’t a spiritually defined value, the only alternative is a beneficent government-god that showers all of us with its – our – vast  resources.

You can look hard for a good government-god.  It will be a long and fruitless search.

• Expect giving to start with me and not with the government or the rich.  We’ve got to stop demanding generosity.  Who gave us the right to insist that other people support the needy?  Who gave government the right to require those other people to give?  When we want to talk about charity, the talk should start with us.

And what’s more common than a politician talking about meeting the needs of the poor and doing nothing personally to meet them?  Should we really consider them to be generous because they redistribute other people’s money?  We’ve had presidential candidates who have claimed to be advocates for the needy, while giving less to charity than they spend on their exterminator.

A politician who gave half of his or her income to charity would still have no right to take from others.  But he or she would at least have earned the right to talk about charity.

We all have the right to encourage and expect others to give – but only after we’ve given generously ourselves.

• Live both a rich and frugal life.  We weren’t put on this earth to be ground into the dirt or to live a barebones existence, but rather to live a life rich in the pursuit of happiness.  But this is no reason to be wasteful or ostentatious, and certainly no reason to pile up mountains of debt that stress us and strip away much of the sumptuousness of life.

Somehow we’ve turned frugality into something less than splendid.  At best it’s viewed as skimping and cheap and boring.  At worst it’s seen as shortchanging yourself on the good life.

We need to practice American thriftiness once again.  It’s the way to the really good life – free from debt, obligations, anxiety, worry, fear, and unnecessary loss.  In an upside-down way, frugality becomes the path to having more of everything good and less of everything not so good.

At times in recent years we’ve had a negative savings rate, as a people spending more than we’re making and making up the difference with borrowing.  Farmers would consider this eating your seed.  For having a little more now, we’re jeopardizing our next crop and perhaps our future.

We don’t need to save half our income.  But we do need to save more than zero.

• Remember the connection between thriftiness and charity.  Happily, some younger Americans seem to get the connection between frugality and generosity.  “Xers appear to be calling for a synthesis that unites components thought to be mutually exclusive.  Like conservatives, they favor fiscal restraint.  Like liberals, they want to help the little guy.”[ii]  And in the American Idea, these two concepts aren’t contradictory – they are mutually reinforcing.

The effect on our personal lives of saving even 5 percent of our income would be tremendous.  We would have a financial reserve against lean times, margin to allow us to breathe easier, opportunity to do new things without mortgaging our future.  We would have the ability to give a bit of what we have away.

And we could insist that our government do the same, spending less than it takes in and either putting the rest in reserve for lean times or returning it to its rightful owners.  It hasn’t been frugal for a very long time now, but it should become so once again, for moral reasons.

And also because it’s running out of other people’s money.

• Remember to love our neighbors.  Small-spirited people focus only on themselves and their own needs and wants.  Great-spirited people focus on those things and have enough heart left over to focus on others.

“Love thy neighbor” is one of the best and least-practiced directions ever given to human beings.[iii]  In the American Idea of Generosity, it finally found a home.

This is one of the most important reasons why the government shouldn’t be allowed into the business of caring for others.  Individuals and private groups will minister to all of the needs of the needy, not just the obvious physical needs.  These needs – love, encouragement, understanding, wisdom – are hard to deliver by an individual or group, but impossible to deliver by a government.

• Insist that the government be generosity-biased with individual and corporate givers in a progressive tax system.  In our current progressive tax system, this means providing full tax deductions for all charitable giving.  Government is always wanting to put caps on charitable deductions as people’s incomes go up, but the question is, “Why?”  Why try to put limits and boundaries around how much people can give away without regard to taxes?

It can’t be just a soak-the-rich scheme, because here people are wanting to give away ever more of their income, are in effect wanting to have less riches.  The bizarre, but only logical, conclusion is that government wants no competitors with its plan of being a government-god, and will do what it can to discourage or minimize those competitors.

• Require people to provide real help for the truly needy directly, not soul-crushing dependency through government, in a Citizenship Tax system.  We might have a moral obligation to help people who are truly in need.  But should we have a legal obligation to help everyone that the government says is in need?

In 2010, the government declared that “The poverty rate climbed to 14.3% of the population, up from 13.2% in 2008 and the highest level since 1994.”[iv]   This rate, however, is totally arbitrary, if not imaginary.  It’s based on a certain income for a family of four that is uniform regardless of the real cost of living, other criteria (like living in a paid off home or trailer, living for free with others, etc.), or what people already have.

Astonishingly, in fact, “The rate measures cash income but not the value of benefits from major anti-poverty programs such as food stamps, Medicaid and the earned income tax credit.”[v]   In other words, not only is the rate based on an arbitrary measure of income, the income doesn’t even include all that the government – the rest of us – are already giving them.  Journalist Matthew Yglesias stated,

When contemplating the rising poverty rate in the face of the economic downturn, it’s important to keep in mind that one crucial quirk of the way the Census Bureau calculates the poverty rate is that the value of things like food stamps and Medicaid isn’t counted in considering whether a family is above or below the line.  If the government enacted a pure cash transfer, like higher earned income tax credit benefits, that would show up as lifting some families out of poverty.  But if the government increases spending on non-cash anti-poverty programs, then whatever benefits those programs have doesn’t count unless they indirectly serve to boost the recipients’ market wages.  This is defensible in many case, but hardly in all.[vi]

Poverty used to be defined as “not having very much” or “not having anything.”  Now the government has redefined it to “not having as much as we – or you – think you should have.”  Author Thomas Sowell noted,

We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and own either a car or a truck.  Why are such people called “poor”?  Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats.  Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.  Those who believe in an expansive, nanny-state government need a large number of people in “poverty” to justify their programs.  They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.[vii]

There are no charities like real charities.  The good ones – most of them – know how to get the money and other assistance to people in need, without a lot of extra fuss and cost.

The government welfare safety net, on the other hand, is all too often a web that strips people of their freedom and dignity.  The first casualty of welfare is the recipient.  There’s no way to be a dependent and be truly free at the same time.  The very position the person is in limits their freedom but also makes that person a servant of government.

In lieu of this government intrusion, a mandatory withdrawal of 3 percent from everyone, a “poor tithe” to be donated to the charities of the citizens’ choice, could address the problem.  In all cases, more money would be available to actually help the people it is claimed are being helped, since the obtrusive middleman is removed.  When added to the other incredible generosity of Americans, the funds available for doing good would be enormous.

In a citizenship (flat) tax system, and with the government out of the generosity business, there would be no need for deductions for charity.  The citizenship tax would be small and focused on other (constitutional) activity, leaving plenty of room for the American Idea of Generosity.

The choice is stark.  We can have a vibrant, energetic array of private charities providing care and help to those who really need it, for as long as they need it.  Or we can have a bureaucratic, lumbering array of government agencies providing endless dependency to those who really need to be free.

Some might say, “Not another 3 percent tax!”  But this is restructured, not new.  We are already paying much more than that for government “generosity.”

• Keep charitable organizations free from the burden of taxes and regulation.  Do we really want government deciding what makes for a legitimate charity?  Other than minimum guidelines – like making sure it isn’t a profit-making business in disguise or that it isn’t a way for people to funnel money to themselves under false pretenses – the government should stay out of the charity business.  It has no moral right to intervene.  It also doesn’t have the intelligence to do it.

Even the Russians, for whom generosity is an almost alien concept, have started to figure this out.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev called…for tax incentives and other measures to assist Russia’s beleaguered nonprofit groups, which have come under pressure in recent years…charities and nonprofit groups have not prospered in Russia because under communism, in which the government was to take care of society’s needs, there was no tradition of private philanthropy…[Medvedev said] “We need to stimulate philanthropy and create a stimulus or a motivation for volunteers who toil for such organizations.”[viii]

The best thing government can do for charities is to leave them alone.

• Get the government out of the generosity business.  We have to see what keeping government on the sidelines really is.  It isn’t giving individual donors or charitable organizations anything.  It’s simply saying that wherever the American spirit of generosity is in bloom, the government should stay out of the garden.

First of all, it isn’t really generosity if you’re giving away other people’s money – and that’s the only kind the government has.  Governments all over the globe have pretended to be munificent government-gods, but it has nothing to do with generosity.  Who couldn’t be generous if they could take whatever they’re giving from anyone they meet?

Individuals and charitable organizations have an incentive to get people off the rolls of the needy and onto the rolls of the self-sufficient.  Government, on the other hand, actually has a perverse incentive – to keep people under the poverty line and on the needy rolls, so there will always be people to serve.  Government can always find something that people need, something that they don’t have and can’t afford without the government’s help.

The American Idea of Generosity involves private, personal giving.  It means leaving people with more of their own money so they can help others directly and not through the take-a-cut-off-the-top, wasteful bureaucracy of government.  Americans have helped themselves and each other for centuries without help from the government, and often in spite of the government.  And this help is effective, as “these groups often have much higher success rates than government-run organizations with similar tasks.”[ix]

• Refuse to buy into the lie that government welfare programs are needed because private generosity is insufficient.  It has been argued that private giving failed in the Great Depression (although even then there were great acts of generosity).  But it is true that the giving couldn’t meet all of the needs.  Why not?

• First, because the government had created such a large-scale disaster with its monetary, fiscal, wage, price and trade policies.  And it extended the scope of the disaster with its anti-business, “stimulus,” and interventionist actions.  There was no way for individuals or businesses to overcome all of this meddling and control.  It could be said of the government what was said of Attila the Hun: “Nothing grows where he has been.”[x]

• Second, because the government had drawn off massive private resources for its projects (and as a way to buy votes).  There wasn’t much excess, and what there was was taken by government.  This is an all-too-common practice of government – creating a problem like an economic bubble, then offering the solution of more government, all the while blaming greedy people and the private sector.

The Great Depression didn’t prove that America had too much capitalism.  It proved that America had too much government.

• Replace foreign aid by government with aid to foreigners by Americans.  People in other countries often need help.  Americans can and will come to the rescue.

But government?  Unlike Doctors Without Borders and Engineers Without Borders, government will pay great attention to borders with its giving.  And there are at least three other problems:

1. The government has more than enough on its plate just trying to keep American strong and safe
2. The money given is taken away from productive Americans, who could grow businesses, employment and wages so Americans would have more to give
3. The government is broke.  The American Ideas provide no basis for government borrowing money to give it to foreign governments

Americans will give – but only when it’s smart charity.

• Value hard work. It has become commonplace to devalue work.  We talk about work-life balance, as though work is the opposite of life (and thus the equivalent of death).  We feel envious about the people who retire early to play golf.  We see whole societies elevate leisure and wine and food and sleep to the pinnacle of human achievement.  Then we wonder why we just missed lunch to accomplish an important task.

But work isn’t a distraction from life.  It is life – a huge part of it.  It can give us a large part of our sense of self-worth and a unique way to make a difference.  The psychologist Erich Fromm said that there are two things that every human being has to do well at to feel great success – relationships and labor.[xi]  The common ground between them is that they both require hard work.

• Give for the right reasons. We can give because we feel guilty, or because other people think we should.  There are many people out there – including many greedy people here at home and economy-wrecking leaders abroad – who would never give a dollar of their own, but will complain endlessly if we don’t give all of ours.

The main reason to give is because we want to – because we believe it’s a uniquely human thing to do, because it negates the harshness of life, and because it denies that we’re only animals trying to survive.