Sadly Martha Gill (behind Observer's paywall) makes the lame argument that the poor are failing to give enough to charity, citing the absolute donations made by the rich.
But, this ignores that the poorer in society has less actual money to give;
more importantly one should measure charity by the proportion of income/wealth donated not its monetary value.
As always on this measure the rich remain less charitable (giving a much smaller share than the poor)!
@ChrisMayLA6 the good news though is that she’s being a paywall. Why would anyone pay for the emanations she passes off as writing is utterly beyond my understanding.
As I have said elsewhere, charities step in to mitigate the harms caused by the failings of governments. In an ideal world they would not be necessary. But since this is not an ideal world we each are asked to contribute proportionately to what we have. I encourage a goal of 5% of income. The math is easy: $£€1 per week for every $£€1,000 you earn per year. If that sound generous, that's because it is! But it would make an enormous difference.
@ChrisMayLA6 The Barclay Brothers were given honours for donating what would be £25/year for the average person.
it is an absurd system
@ChrisMayLA6
Also, charity should be redundant, if tax meets needs and distributed fairly and efficiently.
Charity is a partisan activity and usually, for the rich an exercise in self promotion, and or tax manipulation, etc.
Illustrations: Important though they are: breast cancer vs other cancers, or Rhinos/pandas vs habitat/insects, or catastrophe relief in a popular part of the world vs in a backwater
The key is that governments have the impossible job of choosing, but a good civil service and a government with vision, compassion & foresight should be better than the lottery of charity giving.
There is one paragraph where she addresses this point: a comparison of Leeds and Croydon.
@ChrisMayLA6 I would argue it should be measured as a percentage of income after deduction of essential living costs - which swings it even further against the excessively rich
@ChrisMayLA6 I thought giving to charity, which would also include contributions in kind such as volunteering, was a matter of choice -not some form of competitive guilt
fest ??
@ChrisMayLA6 Charity is covering for the fact the country can not take care of its citizens. In a normally functioning society, charity should not be needed,
Instead, the UK runs on it, much more than many other countries. I've never seen high streets littered with charity shops until I came to the UK.
@ChrisMayLA6 When I lived in Sweden, about 60% of my income went to the government, so I would never give to charity, since that's the governments job with such an unethical, and out right eveil tax policy, and I think many in the EU think the same.
Another interesting qustion is if the lower classes are more easily swayed by emotional arguments?
Since socialists in general are more susceptible to emotional arguments, I would imagine that they are also more easily swayed to give to charity, and that that is a contributing factor to what you are describing.
This could be due to socialists on average, being less educated and intelligent than conservatives and rightists.
maybe, or one might argue the rights are more self-centered & unwilling to see the role of luck in people's plights, thereby aiming those in receipt of charity & seeing them as agents of their own predicament, unworthy of sympathy?
@ChrisMayLA6 I think self-centeredness could be argued, but luck is a non-starter. There is proof that the harder people work, the luckier they get when compared with people who do not work as hard. That aside, luck is alrady corrected for in the form of taxes. Another often forgotten correction for luck, is the trickle down effect which means that actually, and in the long run, everyone benefits from peoples luck, at least as long as we insist in measuring it in money.
But if we move past taxes and luck as a factor in peoples lives, it is impossible to prove how (if any) much luck affects someones life, and all attempts at reducing it are therefore doomed to fail.
But... in terms of self-centeredness, this is also corrected for in terms of the markets which turn egoism into benefits for all. It is the best and most perfectly working system we have for transforming self-centerednesss into communal benefits, and it does it better than taxes.
Last, but not least, one question I find very interesting is how we com to accept (and form, and change) our core values, and how much those ifluence our choice of politics. This for me, is a very interesting question!
Yes, but we might suggest bad luck & good luck are very different in their impacts - certainly I can see an argument that good luck is dealt with in part by taxes, but the difficulty is where the bad luck the effects many is discounted (as noted in a previous answer).... as regards the coordination of selfishness, this was both Adam Smith's point, but also why he was a supported of the regulated economy - he was not convinced it could solve all economic problems or misallocations.
@ChrisMayLA6 Well, misallocation is only a problem depending on what starting point you have. If your starting point is that people do not have the right to their own property and the fruits of their labours, then misallocation is certainly a thing.
But if your starting point is that you have the only right to the fruits of your labours, then by definition, the way I choose to allocate my resources, as long as I am allowed to do it freely, is the perfect allocation, given my goals there and then.
Of course, after the fact, I might discover mistakes, so the capital or resource might be misallocated based on my understanding of the situation, but that can only be argued based on my choices, and not based on anything external, since no one external has a right to my property.
So it does seem to me that for that to make sense, and in fact for taxes to make sense, one must abandon the idea of private property in order not to be inconsistent.
As for Smith and what areas are not best dealt with by markets, could you please give me a reference or two? I have not read his works, so this could be very interesting to look more into.
The relationship between property & taxes has vexed political economists for decade or more.... the key issue being the relation between the state & the maintenance of property rights - one approach is to argue as the state constitutes property, taxes are not so much a payment from the tax-payer as a withholding charge from the state from the overall benefits gained from ownership.
But these are afar from settled ideas not could they be - that is, after all, politics
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On Smith; many people (miss-read) Wealth of Nations, but then do not read Lectures on Jurisprudence which is where the normative balance to the economic mechanisms is set out at length, although actually its also there in WoN, but just often down-played, because people want to only see one part of what he was arguing about the early emergence of capitalism.
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This reminds me of that story in the Bible where the rich person gives a lot of money to a church and the poor person gives a tiny amount but percentagewise the rich person gave 1% of what they had and the poor person gave them 100%, making the poor persons contribution much greater than the rich persons.
@ChrisMayLA6 And many People with less wealth devote more of their own time and energy to supporting people rather than just blindly giving (tax deductible) donations.
@ChrisMayLA6 and if you Gift Aid then you also get a tax break if you're paying a higher rate for tax (really that refund should go to the Charity).
Even if it were to be the case ...
I pay taxes, we all pay taxes so that charities and charitable donations are not / should not be necessary. I do not want to live in a society in which largesse is depended upon to provide essentials to the less fortunate.
It would be nice to live in a polity in which taxes are used to support those who live in poverty whilst, say, Billionaire Petrochemical Corp / Football club owners rely on Charity for their £70million subsidy.
@ChrisMayLA6 The widow's mite...
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