Submitted by Marvin Miller

Religions tell people to be charitable. We all constantly get appeals from charities. The tax code offers a deduction for charitable contributions. What are we to think about charity?

Originally charity meant giving to the poor by people who are not poor. It therefore assumes that there are poor and non-poor people. This is true and always has been true, ever since prehistoric times when things became property. In a society characterized by scarcity, as most societies are and have been, it’s necessarily true. But in a society characterized by abundance, which technological advance over the centuries has made possible, this assumption can be called into question.

In our time and place, the existence of poverty is unnecessary, and therefore it is a moral blot on our society.

There was a time, in the 1960s, when our government recognized this, and the President declared a “war on poverty”. Unfortunately, poverty won that war when the government undertook a shooting war in Vietnam, relegating the “war on poverty” to the sidelines. Since then, eliminating poverty has not been an announced goal in political speech in this country.

Although it began as giving to the poor, charity has evolved over time. Often now it means giving to large wealthy institutions, such as churches, colleges, or hospitals. Such institutions often do good work, but also often make self-aggrandizement a priority over their good work. The prices they charge for health care and education constitute barriers against fulfillment of their beneficent objectives.

In our society, in which relatively few people are super-rich, some of these super-rich people give large sums to charitable institutions. These institutions then come to depend on these donations for their very existence. They are careful to avoid anything that might jeopardize the good will of their large donors. This gives the super-rich a major degree of control over these charitable institutions. It is known, for example, that the presence of carcinogenic chemicals and radiation in the environment is an important cause of cancer. But how much of the effort of anti-cancer institutions is directed toward removing such carcinogens from the environment, compared with their efforts to find cures or treatments for the cancers that do occur?  Could this disparity have something to do with the fact that introducing the carcinogens into the environment is profitable and generates wealth for the actual or potential donors to the charitable institutions? How often do we see on PBS anything critical of the business or political practices of its large donors?

Relief of the effects of poverty or other forms of suffering is a valuable objective of charity. But another, perhaps more important objective is the elimination of their causes.