The Law of Fundraising. Bruce R. Hopkins

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Название The Law of Fundraising
Автор произведения Bruce R. Hopkins
Жанр Экономика
Серия
Издательство Экономика
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119873457



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Committee stated:

      The principle of pluralism was stated by John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1859), as follows:

      In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial (in cases not political); of free and popular local and municipal institutions; of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations. These are not questions of liberty, and are connected with that subject only by remote tendencies; but they are questions of development.… The management of purely local businesses by the localities, and of the great enterprises of industry by the union of those who voluntarily supply the pecuniary means, is further recommended by all the advantages which have been set forth in this Essay as belonging to individuality of development, and diversity of modes of action. Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others; instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.

      This same theme was echoed by then-Secretary of the Treasury George P. Shultz, in testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means in 1973, when he observed:

      Charitable organizations, maintained by tax exemption and nurtured by the ability to attract deductible contributions, are reflective of the American philosophy that all policymaking should not be reposed in the governmental sector. Philanthropy, wrote one jurist,

      Few aspects of American society are more characteristically, more famously American than the nation's array of voluntary organizations, and the support in both time and money that is given to them by its citizens. Our country has been decisively different in this regard, historian Daniel Boorstin observes, “from the beginning.” As the country was settled, “communities existed before governments were there to care for public needs.” The result, Boorstin says, was that “voluntary collaborative activities” were set up to provide basic social services. Government followed later.

      Underpinning the virtual omnipresence of voluntary organizations, and a form of individual initiative in its own right, is the practice—in the case of many Americans, the deeply ingrained habit—of philanthropy, of private giving, which provides the resource base for voluntary organizations. Between money gifts and the contributions of time and labor in the form of volunteer work, giving is valued at more than $50 billion a year, according to Commission estimates.

      Exemption