What about Altruism/Charity/Philanthropy?

Why do people give money to needy people or public causes? Why should people make charitable or philanthropic contributions? What is altruism and how can it best be implemented? These are questions worth careful consideration.  

Give because of Greed?

Some of us grew up in churches that stressed tithing—and I have been a tither my whole life and encouraged tithing when I was a pastor. But I never told people that tithing was a means for receiving God’s blessings and to receive more from God than they ever gave to God and God’s work.

There are preachers, though, who have appealed to people’s “greed” to encourage them to tithe. “If you tithe, God will reward you by increasing your income” was the appalling “pitch” some preachers used, seeking to bolster the church’s financial income.

More generally, there are those who give because of the “greedy” desire for the good feelings they get from contributing to the emotional appeals by charitable organizations and/or needy people.

Perhaps greed is too strong a word to use here, but I simply mean the strong desire to get more of something, such as more blessings and (maybe) money or more feelings of self-satisfaction.

Give because of Guilt?

Historically, two of the most generous philanthropists in the U.S. were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Carnegie (1835~1919) made his fortune in the steel industry, and the wealth of Rockefeller (1839~1937) came largely from profits he made from the Standard Oil Company, which he established in 1870.

The philanthropy of those two industrialists is clearly visible in the worldwide Carnegie libraries and the work of the Rockefeller Foundation. And without doubt, multitudes of people have been helped by the philanthropic gifts of those two men .**

However, recently June and I have watched (on DVD) The Men Who Built America, the six-hour miniseries docudrama originally broadcast on the History Channel in 2012, and we have seen an apparently accurate portrayal of the ruthlessness of those two tycoons and the harm they did to so many.

Particularly horrifying were the catastrophic Johnstown Flood of 1889 and the Homestead Steel Mill Strike/Massacre of 1892. The docudrama clearly depicts Carnegie’s culpability in both of those tragedies.

That excellent miniseries, though, fails to note that those catastrophes occurred during the very time Walter Rauschenbusch was pastor in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City and beginning to emphasize what came to be known as the Social Gospel (see my 9/30 blog post).

Even though Carnegie had built a few libraries before those events that significantly tarnished his good name, most of his philanthropic work was after them and most likely at least partly rooted in his sense of guilt and his desire to restore his reputation.

Give because of Gratitude?

In the New Testament, Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, “Freely you have received; freely give” (10:8, NIV). Accordingly, it is obvious that the best reason for altruistic giving is not because of “greed” or guilt but because of gratitude.

A strong sense of gratitude goads us to give graciously to help others. But how is the best way to give? Just acting upon our subjective feelings may not be best.

In recent years, an “effective altruism” movement has been popular in some circles. It recommends rationally considering ways to give that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people rather than giving on the basis of emotional appeals and feel-good causes.

(You may want to check out this website: Using reason and evidence to do the most good - Effective Altruism.)

Interestingly, two major proponents of effective altruism are non-religious thinkers/writers: Peter Singer (b. 1946) and Steven Pinker (b. 1954). To learn more about them, see Singer’s 2013 TED talk and this 2021 interview with Pinker.

There is also an Effective Altruism for Christians website (see here). I also encourage you to (re)read Guidelines for Charitable Giving, my blog post for Nov. 30, 2010.

Yes, there is much to consider with regard to altruism/charity/philanthropy.

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** I wrote about those two outstanding philanthropists in my Sept. 15, 2017, blog post titled “Problems with Philanthropy,” and it is worth reading again.

Carnegie and the "Death Tax"

Andrew Carnegie, the industrial giant and philanthropist, was born on this day (Nov. 25) in 1835. His life and legacy is somewhat of a conundrum: he was both a hard task-master and cruel industrialist as well a warm-hearted, benevolent man who greatly wanted world peace—and who favored an inheritance tax.

The Coming (?) Change is the “Death Tax”

As of this writing, the both highly touted and highly criticized tax reform bill currently being considered by the U.S. Congress is still in flux. But the present estate tax provision will most likely be unchanged in the final version of the bill, which possibly will be signed into law. DJT is promising this will be done before Christmas.

The opponents of the current estate tax provision, which seem to include most Republican legislators, are wont to call it a “death tax.” Further, they emphasize how unfair it is to the families of hard-working people who wish to pass their accumulated wealth on to their descendants.

So, changing this provision is one of many changes in the tax reform bill, which has already passed by the House. The Senate version, yet to be voted on, currently has the same projected estate tax change as the House bill.

Misleading Claims about the “Death Tax”

Sam Graves is the U.S. Representative from the district where I live. In his Nov. 15 email newsletter to people in his district, Rep. Graves decried the estate tax, writing that “a tax that kicks in when you die is absurd.” His main point: “Farmers are hit especially hard by the death tax.”

What Rep. Graves failed to mention is that currently $5,490,000 is exempted from the tax that he thinks is so despicable. (I wonder how many farmers in north Missouri have an estate worth more than that.)

According to the Center on the Budget and Policy Priorities (see here), in 2017 only two out of every 1,000 estates will owe federal estate tax—5,500 out of the nation’s 2,700,000 estates (about 0.02%); only 80 of those (0.003%) are small farms and businesses.

The tax bill already passed by the House doubles that exemption immediately and eliminates it completely after six years—and this in the name of tax reform for the benefit of the working middle class.   

But guess who benefits from this change in the estate tax? The wealthiest people in the land, of course—including the Trump children who will potentially gain as much as $1.4 billion if the tax reform bill is signed into law by the President.

Carnegie’s Surprising Support of Estate Tax

Many of you perhaps read my article about the questionable philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie and two other wealthy people. (You can read/review that article here.) In reading about Carnegie before writing that article, I was surprised at what he said about the need for an estate tax.

In a June 1889 article titled “Wealth,” Carnegie wrote,

Of all forms of taxation, this [the estate tax] seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.

Near the end of that article, Carnegie asserted that the person who dies rich “dies disgraced."

When Carnegie died in 1919, he had already given away over $350,000,000 (over $5 trillion in 2017 dollars) of his wealth. After his death, his last $30,000,000 was given to foundations, charities, and to pensioners. 

Kudos to Carnegie!

Problems with Philanthropy

To the Stars through Difficulties is a new book by Kansas author Romalyn Tilghman. I recently read Romalyn’s delightful novel and enjoyed hearing her discuss it on Wednesday afternoon.

The Case of Andrew Carnegie

The Carnegie libraries of Kansas are the backdrop of Tilghman’s novel. Early on she informs her readers that industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) built 59 libraries in Kansas in the early 1900s and that “he gave the country 1689 libraries that served thirty-five million people by 1919.”

That is impressive philanthropy! And it is only part of what Carnegie did with his great wealth.

But on the same page Romalyn acknowledges Carnegie’s “despicable treatment of mineworkers, including the murder of seven men in his attempt to break up the union,” and reports that some Kansas communities “refused to take his tainted money even for the promise of a library.“

She then rightly states that Carnegie was “both a philanthropist and robber baron (p. 7).”  

The Case of John D. Rockefeller

Andrew Carnegie vied with John D. Rockefeller as being the richest man in the world. Like Carnegie, Rockefeller (1839-1937) also started life in rather humble circumstances but through hard work, ingenuity, and shrewd business deals he also became a man of great wealth.

From boyhood and throughout his lifetime Rockefeller was a faithful Baptist church member—and a tither. From his early 50s, he deliberately began his philanthropic activities.

A chapter in Ellen Greenman Coffey’s small book John D. Rockefeller is titled “The Pious Robber Baron.”

In a later chapter, “An Investment in Good Works,” Greenman tells of Rockefeller’s increasing involvement in giving his money away under the tutelage of Frederick T. Gates, a young Baptist minister whom he employed.

Among the many projects Gates (1853-1929) led his boss to support, one of the best-known is the Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913 after years of planning.

Rockefeller’s philanthropic work, however, was partly in response to the negative publicity he had suffered from Ida Tarbell’s 1904 book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, in which she depicted Rockefeller as “miserly, money-grabbing, and viciously effective at monopolizing the oil trade.”  

The Case of Joan Kroc

Recently, June and I watched “Founder,” the 2016 movie about Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s restaurants into the wealthiest fast food chain in the world—but not without the use of devious means.

Joan was Krok’s third wife. They married in 1969, when Ray was 67 years old, and she inherited his wealth after his death in 1984. Their story is told in Lisa Napoli’s 2016 book titled Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away.

Joan’s $1.5 billion gift to Salvation Army is said to be the largest philanthropic gift ever made by an individual in the U.S. The bulk of that gift has been used to build and maintain 26 Kroc Centers throughout the country.  

Problems with Philanthropy

Very summarily, here are some problems with philanthropy, clearly seen in that of the three people mentioned above:

(1) There is a problem of how the wealth of the philanthropists is gained, particularly when it is by exploitation of workers and shrewd (bordering on illegal) business practices.

(2) Then, most philanthropists tend to aggrandize themselves in their charitable giving. Everyone knows of Carnegie libraries, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Kroc centers.

(3) And then consider these insightful words by William Jewett Tucker, a contemporary critic of Carnegie:

I can conceive of no greater mistake, more disastrous in the end to religion if not to society, than of trying to make charity do the work of justice.