On the wealthy, their taxes (and culture)

Last week Lee Rosenbaum and several other bloggers argued that Americans who donate money to foreign museums should not be entitled to a federal tax deduction. The America first of it all didn't sit well with me.

The United States fancies itself the world's leading nation. Most of the world's wealthiest individuals are Americans and our citizens, from Warren Buffett to Joe Six-pack, are the most generous people in the world. America's finest moments in the Bush years have been not government actions, but the extraordinary philanthropy of individuals (Witness: The response of individual Americans to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.)

Surely the writers who argue that Americans should not receive tax deductions for giving to a charity in The Hague (say, the Mauritshuis) must believe that Americans should not be incentiveized to help to victims of the 2004 tsunami?

One of the reasons I'm attracted to art - and I suspect that this is true of many people who donate money to museums the world over - is that it is a Big Idea. It is not a Big French Idea, a Big Moroccan idea or a Big Iranian idea. The art of those places, going back hundreds of years, is interrelated. One reason people are attracted to art is because artists have found ways to bridge cultures and eras.

Donors who support the Mauritshuis or the Belvedere understand that it's just as important to maintain and display Rembrandt for the Dutch or Klimt for Austrians as it is to take care of that art for all of us. Art is a shared human history. The preservation of our shared culture should not be limited to narrowly-incentivized, nationalistic funding streams. (Similarly, disasters such as the tsunami or the Qom earthquake are shared events. They devastate specific geographies, but their impact is felt the world over.)

When a donor chooses to help save the Hermitage Matisses, we should thank her for saving a bit of our common cultural history. If we, through our tax code, withhold our gratitude because we feel she should have saved Matisses in Philadelphia instead, we have begun a zero-sum exercise in smallness.