‘Tis the season for annual reports and we now know — exactly —
who gave what to whom and for what hopeful purposes. This financial
transparency provides both a database for scholars and a target for
critics. In the dash to the media microphones, the latter proved
fleeter of foot. Just a few examples:
The soi-disant D.C. omnipresence Pablo Eisenberg, in a widely
quoted piece headlined “Americans Generous? Not
Really,” epitomizes the trendy view: “At a time when the wealthiest
Americans have achieved sharp gains in income, it is a distressing
sign that the overall share of income going to charity has remained
relatively unchanged at about 2 percent.” Another way to headline
that same story, of course, would be to say: “Contributions From
Rich Surge Along With New Wealth.” We love Pablo, but we think it
unlikely that his dream of a world awash in capital but
uncontaminated by capitalists will materialize anytime soon.
Then there is the spray of ideological pellets from the
embrasure of the New York Times manned by class
warrior-journalist David Cay Johnson. The eager-beavering Johnson
has never met a heap of financial stats that he couldn’t separate
into two neat piles labeled The Uncaring Rich and The Oppressed
Poor. Think of them, in Johnsonian terms, as Vice and Virtue. Just
this past week we heard from a senior member of the U.S. Senate
(because we were speaking personally and not professionally we will
not cite him by name) who told us flatly that the “rich are
charitable only when there’s a PR hit in it for them.” Or as Robert
Frank, the Wall Street Journal columnist, repined: “Too much of today’s charity is about
gratifying the giver, rather than helping the needy.”
Well, we enjoy a good rant as much as the next guy. (Okay, maybe
more.) But the problem with cant rolling unchallenged through the
policy world is that, amplified by partisan megaphones, it can lead
to legislation. Personal judgments of moral hygiene have before and
may once again become…The Law. So let’s poke just a few
fact-sticks through the spokes of this fast-moving bicycle. For the
year just reported (2006) American individuals, foundations, and
corporations donated $295 billion to charity.*
That’s more than Americans have ever donated before. That’s more
than any other country has ever donated. In fact, that’s more than
any other two countries have ever donated — more per capita, more
as a percentage of income, more in inflation-adjusted terms. Just
plain more.
And as I reminded my friend the Senator, there were 87 gifts of
$1 million or more donated anonymously. Ascribe whatever motivation
you like, but hunger for publicity will not explain those gifts.
Messrs. Eisenberg, Johnson, and the other travel agents for
upper-class guilt trips are wrong, but, from the long-term
perspective, perhaps unwittingly constructive. Charity is a pillar
of American democracy and almost anything that enhances its social
presence — including the carp and the kvetch — is to be
encouraged.
Think of it this way. Much of American history can be viewed as
one endless and endlessly fascinating conversation between Thomas
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The question that engaged them
was: Where in the American system shall we place the locus of
power? Should we shove it toward the core with the state, or push
it out toward the periphery with the individual? Where can we
strike the harmonious balance between the freedom of the people and
the power of their government? The answer for America has changed
over time and circumstance but the question itself has perdured. It
will be at the heart of the national election this year just as
surely as it was at the heart of George Washington’s campaign.
Quite obviously, the Hamiltonian centripetalists have been
getting the best of it in recent years. The Jeffersonian voice is
all but stilled in the town square. (Can you imagine the frisson
that would have passed through Hamilton upon hearing the term
Big-Government Republican? Thus inflamed, he would have fled to the
arms of his mistress. Even his wife might have been at risk.) But
the Jefferson-Hamilton debate, only temporarily quiescent, burns
still in the hearts of their countrymen and it does so, I would
argue, precisely because of the robust nature of American
charity.
Call them Burke’s little platoons or Tocqueville’s voluntary
associations or identify them only as the scurrying brother-keepers
we see all around us — it is this charitable impulse beeping so
insistently through American life that keeps at bay the
presumptions of the welfare state. Absent help from friend and
colleague and neighbor and fellow parishioner, absent help from the
private community, Americans like their European cousins would have
turned instinctively to government for both succor and
direction.
Americans generous? You bet. And thank God for that.
