We all know Europe has a wide publicly-provided social and cultural net delivering much of what U.S. nonprofits offer. For that reason, charitable giving is regarded differently there.
A Der Spiegel interview with German multimillionaire Peter Krämer sums up the European sentiment pretty nicely, in a response to the Buffett/Gates $600 billion challenge.
Here’s an excerpt from the short interview:
Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That’s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?
Welcome, Kelly, and your #1 fan. Thanks for commenting and directing us to your valuable content.
For a more long-winded version of the same point of view–by an American–please see my most recent piece on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-kleiman/billions-for-charity-but-_b_699289.html
So it’s not actually an issue of the European expectation that there will be a state-provided social safety net–more like the European sensitivity to things that might threaten democracy, which they haven’t enjoyed quite as uninterruptedly as Americans have.
Kelly Kleiman’s always excellent blog, the Nonprofiteer, had a thought-provoking analysis last week of this issue from a US perspective. See “An Appraising Stare Down the Gift Horse’s Gullet” at http://nonprofiteer.net/2010/08/31/an-appraising-stare-down-the-gift-horses-gullet/