ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the proposals of the OECD’s report, Taxation and Philanthropy, for the taxation of private philanthropy. Its perspective is the OECD’s own historical position, the ethos of its institutional forebears, the original Marshall Planners. Their understanding of philanthropy, much contested in the West itself today, was widely shared at end of World War II by both Western elites and the citizens of the nations they led. Their goal was the worldwide vision that President Roosevelt outlined in his Four Freedoms speech – freedom of expression and worship, freedom from fear and want. As they agreed on the end, so they agreed on the means: Achieving their philanthropic vision – at peace as well as at war, abroad as well as at home, in the developing world as well as in reconstructed Europe – required an active international alliance of like-minded states, states that were themselves philanthropic, active in the traditional work of private philanthropy. They saw in their time what we must see in ours: For the foreseeable future, as in the recent past, activist states committed to positive liberty are the only agents of philanthropy truly capable of doing its work on a global scope and scale.
