[Good Rich, Bad Rich] Good Giving, Bad Giving

Using my own money to help people in need is a good thing. Voluntary charity enriches the giver’s heart first. People often say that on the day they return from helping those in need, they feel very much at peace.

Donations also warm the hearts of those who receive them. They can ease, to some extent, the suffering caused by poverty and can even give people hope for the future. Working hard, earning money, and donating it to those in need is a valuable and worthy act.

However, even when making donations, there is something one must be careful about. The most important thing to guard against is allowing interventionists to grow stronger through charitable giving. Among those who work for charities, many are hostile to the capitalist market economy. As a result, donating to such organizations often becomes, before anything else, a matter of paying salaries to the people who work there rather than helping the poor. Through donations, anti-capitalist forces can grow stronger. That has happened even in the United States, which is called a paradise of philanthropy. The Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation, established in the names of their founders, are among the most representative charitable organizations. All three founders of these foundations were ardent supporters of the liberal market economy. But as time passed, the foundations’ money came to be controlled by people who despised the market economy.

The Rockefeller Foundation alone is a case in point. When Rockefeller established the foundation, the principle he set was that its money should be used for charity, but in a way that did not foster dependency among recipients or lead to waste. He created the foundation to complement the market economy. But as time passed, those around him erected barriers so that Rockefeller could no longer interfere with how the money was used. In the process, that money became a source of funding for the progressive camp.

The same thing is already happening in Korea. The 800 billion won donated by Samsung has already left the donor’s hands, and the donations made by Hyundai are likely no different.

If Korea is to produce more wealthy people than it does now, free enterprise must take firm root. That is why wealthy people who engage in charity must carefully check whether their donations are being used to complement and strengthen free enterprise. If their donations are used to undermine the market economy, then in the end they are engaging in harmful giving.

Original title: [좋은 부자, 나쁜 부자] 좋은 기부 나쁜 기부

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2007-12-17

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=19&idx=10708