Charity vs masochism

I’m all in favour of altruistic acts of charitable donation, but it appears that some wealthy Germans have gone a step further and requested that the German government impose a 5pc wealth tax on them for two years in order to raise revenue to bring the country out of recession. I am pretty much at a loss to understand why these individuals, if they have oodles of money lying around that they have no need for, do not raise their charitable giving to social or religious foundations (of which Germany has a fair few), but instead assume that the government has a better idea than they themelves do of where the money should be spent.

To be fair, the idea smacks slightly of a publicity stunt, or at best a symbolic vote of confidence in the new centre-right coalition government – but even so, I am incredulous at how readily these wealthy Germans are prepared to give up elements of their economic liberty. That they expect the revenue raised by the notional 5pc tax to pay for anything other than politicians’ expenses and bureaucratic salaries is frankly laughable. And in economic terms, they have some seriously weird preferences if a smaller endowment is on a superior indifference curve to a larger one… but then, this is presumably the sort of case that the phrase ‘more money than sense’ was invented for…

~ by Marius Ostrowski on October 23, 2009.