Mr. Moderate

I’ve just finished a blog post on The Power of Tithing. One of my utopian dreams is that people who choose to live in this modern community with ancient values would return to the idea of tithing for charitable purposes. I believe that, implicit in my idea of financial togetherness would be some sort of automatic system for segregating tithes and accumulating them as contributions when they would do the most good according to the tax code. As I discuss in my blog post, given the high rate of tax collections by government (amounting to roughly 13% of total personal income), it is not surprising at all that the total amount of charitable giving is less than about 2% of total personal income. We can do better than that, and part of our social obligations to our fellow humans should be an obligation to actually do it.

Given that computerized accounting is pretty cheap these days, we ought to be able to track the tithe liabilities of every member of the community. We may well establish policies that while somebody is young and/or a lower-income earner, they might be allowed to defer their tithing obligations into the future. But it should remain as an obligation to the community at large, to be enforced as a top-priority lien against the estate of somebody who dies or leaves the community voluntarily.

Whatever the overall money flows are within my utopian community, there should be some provision for enforcing a tithing obligation as part of those financial flows.