Then why does society allow someone to reduce their tax liability for “charity”?

Of course, it would be better if there were no deductions in the first place, and the government just paid for content if it wanted to pay for content which was then automatically in the public domain.

The idea is that when you donate to charity, the money is never “yours” - you never benefit from it.

Analogously, if part of your compensation was a donation to charity, you wouldn’t be taxed on it.

> it would be better if there were no donations in the first place, and the government just

A lot of Democrats in red states and Republicans in blue states disagree.

If America removed the charitable tax deduction, the big losers would include churches, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign, ACLU, etc

> The idea is that when you donate to charity, the money is never “yours” - you never benefit from it.

Of course you do. If you didn't benefit from the donation, you wouldn't have made it.

Just for clarification, do you mean this tautologically? As in, if I produce examples of people not materially or socially benefiting from their charitable donations (such as by donating anonymously in countries without charitable tax deductions) would your argument reduce to "They only give to charity to feel better about themselves, therefore they benefited and would not have made the donation otherwise"?

I'm willing to give up the tautological definition in the edge case of "donated food anonymously to the poor" type cases. But I think that the number of ways of selfishly donating are both the vast majority and far broader than "material or social" benefiting.

Okay, now I'm more interested. Your original claim was;

>If you didn't benefit from the donation, you wouldn't have made it.

If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that the vast majority of charitable donations a) do not materially or socially benefit the donater, b) are still selfish (in that donating the money offers greater personal advantage than using the money in other ways), and c) would not be given if those benefits were not received in return. Could you give some examples of what kind of donations you're talking about, because I'm not sure we're communicating from the same basic understanding of what a charitable donation is.

That would be true if people only do things that benefit themselves.

But that’s just not how humans are.

Soldiers volunteer to throw themselves on grenades.

Humans are social creatures who have evolved to be willing to sacrifice for others.

>Analogously, if part of your compensation was a donation to charity, you wouldn’t be taxed on it.

Which is basically how corporate gift matching works.

Do you really want government as the primary arbiter of what goes on PBS? At that point, it might as well be a government news channel. Though for better or worse, broadcast channels--including PBS--are less and less relevant. The federal government in the US is perfectly within its rights to commission and host content on .gov--which in general would be public domain.

Because lobbyists receive a healthy sum to achieve and defend their benefactors’ ability to influence societal development by indulging in subsidised philanthropy they can focus on issues and aspects they desire (rather than going through the State and governmental assignment of funds).

> Of course, it would be better if there were no deductions in the first place, and the government just paid for content if it wanted to pay for content which was then automatically in the public domain.

You are arguing in favor of government propaganda, because that's what will happen in your scenario.

> What twisted logic hahaha

Try to remain respectful, this isn't Twitter or Reddit.