It's time for year-end charitable contributions

It's the time of year for posting any contributions to charities and organizations working towards causes you care about. Typically, those donations must be received by the charity by December 31st in order to count towards your tax year for 2007.

However, as Steven Malanga details in this article in the most recent edition of City Journal, many charitable organizations (including, increasingly, religious ones) are actively involved in bashing the capitalist system which enables the creation of the very wealth that they receive from their contributors.

For example, the article quotes the co-president of Interfaith Worker Justice as saying that America must save itself from "its own arrogance, its selfishness and its greed" and as speaking out against those "wallowing in an obscenity of massive unearned wealth." The Executive Director and Founder of the same organization is quoted as saying that America needs "redistribution" to "shift wealth from a few to working families." That same organization (Interfaith Worker Justice) receives funding and financial support from over 100 religious organizations, including the National Council of Churches of the USA (NCC) and, the article notes, some key members of the NCC including the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) "are particularly active."

The article also cites a quotation from Father Robert Sirico, the President of the Acton Institute, which (according to its website) promotes "integrating Judeo-Christian truths with free market principles." He states that if religious leaders targeted by groups such as Interfaith Worker Justice (in this case, seminarians) don't have an economic background, it's easy for them to fall into the fallacy "that our economy is a zero-sum game that demands conflict between business owners and workers."

We've written about the fallacy of the zero-sum mentality on this blog before, such as in this post and this post. It is sad that those who benefit greatly from the wealth creation enabled by a mostly free economy are often tricked by the rhetoric of those with a zero-sum view of the world.