What’s Wrong with Charity and Philanthropy?
By: Will Shetterly
Tags: Social Justice, Socialism, Basic Income, Philanthropy, Charity

The rich love charity because imagining the appreciation of the poor makes them feel good. The rich love philanthropy even more because imagining the admiration of their peers makes them feel even better. They know as well as you and I do that neither charity nor philanthropy can stop the growth of the wealth gap.

What the rich won’t admit is that charity and philanthropy are not supposed to end poverty. The educated rich know the only things that have ever shrunk the wealth gap in the US were Keynesian social programs—which may be why neoliberals began gutting and abandoning those programs under Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.

When leftists criticize charity or philanthropy, fans of capitalism ask if we don’t believe in helping people. They don’t see that we criticize charity because we care. If we didn’t, we would shrug when hypocrites seek profit or praise in the name of helping others or when well-meaning people do inefficient things in the belief they’re doing good.

a few quotes about philanthropy

“Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Millionaires at one end of the scale involved paupers at the other end, and even so excellent a man as Mr. Carnegie is too dear at that price.” — Hugh Price Hughes

“First they take billions from you, then they give back half. And that makes them the world’s greatest humanitarians.” — Slavoj Zizek

“I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?” — Albert Einstein

“Philanthropy is the private allocation of stolen social wages.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.” — Clement Attlee

“Let no one believe, however, that the “cultivated” Englishman openly brags with his egotism. On the contrary, he conceals it under the vilest hypocrisy. What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow.” — Friedrich Engels

Related: America’s Wealthiest Family Uses Phony Philanthropy to Increase Personal Wealth

The 19th-century critique of big philanthropy

Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Charity — Mishneh Torah, Laws of Charity, 10:7–14 — Chassidic Thought

Ignorant Christians need to STFU about ‘the poor you will always have with you’ until they can be bothered to understand what Jesus actually said

Why the Rich Don’t Give to Charity — The Atlantic