Tag: giving back

Giving Back, Again

This question appears on the website of an alumni organization to which I belong:

If the __________ were to ask all current members to give back to their community as part of their [membership] requirements, how would you like to see that play out? For example, what kind of service or citizenship activities and programs would have been useful or enriching for you, as an __________ member?

I will play the devil’s advocate by asking why a person should “give back” to his or her community. To “give back” suggests, to me, that the “giver” hasn’t been giving all along. For example, a person who earns $1 million a year (unless it’s obtained through theft, fraud, or the use of state power) hasn’t stolen anything from anyone else. Rather, that person has given $1 million worth of value to others, for which those others have paid voluntarily.

I don’t mean to disparage acts of voluntarism and charity; such acts are laudable. But they are laudable because they are voluntary, not because they signify a debt that must be repaid by “giving back.” And they are laudable only if they are undertaken in a way that doesn’t draw attention to the “giver.”

But “giving back” — in this instance, as in most others — smacks of bragging and condescension. A mind reader would find something like this among the “giver’s” thoughts:

Oh, how fortunate I am or you/we are to be blessed with brains/looks/money. It is therefore incumbent on me to make a point of my superiority by doing something gracious for less fortunate persons in whose company I otherwise wouldn’t be caught dead.

I would like not to read about a rich alumnus who has given his alma mater millions of dollars, with the understanding or in the expectation that an endowment fund or campus building will bear his name in perpetuity. I would like not to read about a movie star who has scoured third world for orphans worthy of adoption. I would like not to see TV coverage of star athletes who prance about on a field with children of many hues for the few minutes that it takes to film said coverage.

Were I not to read and see such things, I would know that voluntarism and charity don’t warrant special attention because they are unexceptional acts.

Related post: Giving Back

Giving Back

In the latter years of my tenure at a tax-funded think-tank, our CEO established a “community service” program so that our professional staff of well-paid, mostly white, economists, mathematicians, and scientists could “give back to the community.” The “community” to which the aforementioned professionals gave “service” did not, of course, comprise well-paid, white professionals.

I am confident that the targets of our CEO’s “social consciousness” paid only a minuscule fraction of the taxes that funded the nicely appointed offices, high salaries, and generous benefits enjoyed by our professionals. “Giving back” to the “community” that actually supported them would have involved mowing lawns, tutoring, and babysitting for mostly white, middle- and upper-income professionals in other parts of the D.C. area than the one selected by our CEO as the “community” to which to “give back.”

If the services provided by our professional staff in exchange for their splendid offices, salaries, and benefits had been worth their weight in taxes, there would have been no need for those professionals to “give back” to any community. Taxpayers would have received their money’s worth, and that would have been that.

Our CEO either felt guilty about his huge office, princely salary, and obscene benefits or he thought that the think-tank wasn’t giving taxpayers fair value for their money. As he would have been the last person in the United States to admit that the think-tank wasn’t delivering fair value, I can only conclude that his yearning to “give back” arose from feelings of guilt, which he projected onto his employees — many of whom undoubtedly had similar feelings. For, even as the CEO pressed his employees to “give back,” he sought to justify the spending of more tax dollars on better quarters and higher compensation for the think-tank and its employees (himself included, of course).

Feelings of guilt aren’t confined to those who feed at the public trough, of course. CEOs and senior executives of large corporations have a good thing going for themselves — which they owe to their chummy relations with boards of directors — and they know it. Thus the impetus for private-sector “giving back.”

In summary, “giving back to the community” is either an unnecessary act — because “the community” already has received fair value for its money — or it is emblematic of guilt. In the first instance, “giving back” is really an act of charity, which comes at the expense of those who pay for a company’s products (i.e., taxpayers or consumers). In the second instance, “giving back” is really a false act of contrition and an inadequate, misdirected form of atonement for executive avarice.

Having said all of that, I must add this: In the era of bailouts that is now upon us, there is much to be said for “giving back” by bankers, U.S. auto makers, members of the UAW, and defaulting mortgagors — to name a few of the recent and prospective additions to the already vast roster of government clients. That these new clients, like their predecesssors, will not “give back” is, of course, a foregone conclusion.

Moreover, if the present regime has its way there will be some kind of “national service” program which (through tax incentives if not downright conscription) will divert resources from useful (i.e., marketable) ends to “socially conscious” (i.e., government-dictated) ones. “National service,” in other words, is assuredly not a means of “giving back.” It is, rather, a means of taking away — of stealing time and opportunities from those who are conscripted into it, of stealing money from those whose incomes are conscripted (taxed) to support it.