Kevin Williamson on "The Age of Envy"

Very good piece knocking Robert Reich's recent article (meet the old article, same as the old article) decrying a tax code which permits the wealthy tax deductions for charitable donations.

It's worth reading in full. But here's some of it. I'm digesting the key points made for people who want a shorter version, but seriously, just read the whole thing.

Professor Reich, a ward of the taxpayers of California (at $246,199.84 per annum) and a federal ward before that, is persistently unhappy about how other people use their money, and he scoffs that America’s rich philanthropists are phony and self-serving, investing too much in opera and ballet and fancy colleges, and too little in feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. He particularly resents the fact that our tax code encourages such giving, with deductions that reduced federal revenue by some $39 billion last year — federal revenue that could have gone toward employing men such as Robert Reich.

Reich is very upset that the lion's share of the $39 billion in tax deductions go to the wealthy. But who else would they go to? The wealthy give away larger sums of money.

While he notes the $39 billion in tax deductions, he doesn't tell the reader how much they give away to get that $39 billion in tax deductions: $316 billion.

Our innumerate class warriors dismiss philanthropy as a complicated tax dodge for the rich, but in fact tax deductions amount to about 12 percent of total charitable donations, meaning that our wily robber barons have figured out a way of beating the taxman by . . . giving away far more money than they receive in related tax benefits. Even if Professor Reich got his way on tax rates and they went up to 90 percent at the top, you still don’t come out ahead by giving away money.

He next attacks Reich's claim that too much of this charitable giving is to tony cultural charities -- orchestras, ballets, theaters, and other such cult artifacts of the privileged classes, rather than towards feeding and housing the poor.

Williamson crunches the numbers and discovers how much is "too much" in contributions towards cultural affairs, in Reich's eyes-- it works out to be 4.5% of charitable giving.

Giving to art-and-culture organizations amounted to just over $14 billion in 2012, or about 4.5 percent of charitable contributions, far less than was given to health, human-services, or public-benefit organizations. There are a fair number of single organizations that run into the billions per year, including YMCA ($6.24 billion), Goodwill Industries ($5 billion), Catholic Charities ($4.4 billion), and the Red Cross ($3.12 billion).

But is $14 billion of private charitable giving towards high-class cultural concerns a waste of money? Williamson wonders what Reich would say about government spending on these very same concerns.

A question, though: If spending on art, music, and culture is self-serving when private citizens do it, what is it when government does it? Essential, necessary, crucial — of course....

Try cutting a piece of that and you’ll hear howls about how vital every farthing spent in the service of culture is.

And why the contradiction? Because what Reich really objects to is that billions of dollars of wealth are being redistributed... but they're being voluntarily distributed by people who aren't under his control. He doesn't have a piece of the action, you see.

He wants this sort of spending under government control, because he wants to feel virtuous in directing the spending of other people's money for charity.

Prayerful people bargaining with God over lottery numbers no doubt imagine that they would do some worthy things with that money, on top of buying a Ferrari. Progressives imagine all the wonderful things they could do with other people’s money, and no doubt some of them are well-intentioned. But envy poisons whatever good intentions they have, which is how men such as Professor Reich come to write resentful indictments of people who are, remember, giving away billions of dollars of their own money. He’d prefer their money be given away by him, or by bureaucracies under the tutelage of men such as himself.

It's this point that chafes people like Reich. The progressive mindset is an ego-pleasing delusion, a fantasia which assures the progressive that He is the Hero.

He fights for the Poor (the MacGuffins). He is heroically offended by those who aren't doing their share for Poor. By writing articles about the Poor, and by being fashionably outraged by those who aren't sufficiently outraged by poverty themselves, he imagines himself as a Soldier on the battlefield of morality.

But notice, of course, he's not giving away his own money. He's not, like a Soldier, making actual sacrifices.

No, he has decided that his contribution to the cause will be in the form of articles and White Papers and manifestos. The Soldiers-- the grunts -- will do the actual fighting. But he and other members of the New Class will do the truly important work of Bossing the Soldiers About.

And that's the only way he gets a little slice of the Virtue Pie. There are Virtuous Things being done, but Reich isn't actually doing them. And yet he wishes to conceive of himself as Virtuous; as Astonishingly Virtuous, in fact. But how can he so conceive of himself if he's not actually doing any of the Virtuous heavy lifting?

Well, he'll be the guy who properly directs the heavy lifting, like that guy who says he'll help you move a couch, but then plops himself down in a big comfy chair and just tells other people to "Lift with their legs" and "Be careful of the doorway" and "Watch it, you're going to scuff the wall with the couch's leg."

That's his job. That's the job he's assigned himself. Not to be the actual Doer of Virtue, but to be instead the even more important Public Director of Virtuous Deeds.

Private charitable giving is threat to his job as Public Director of Virtuous Deeds, as he can't even contrive a fictional narrative in which he's somehow a key player in other people's private voluntary giving. He can only contrive that ego-plumping narrative if he and his class are somehow involved in directing charity traffic.

And thus it is that Robert Reich, while living handsomely on the public's dime, can fulminate at the public for not doing its share of all these Important Things.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4.

posted by Ace at 02:06 PM

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