Preserving the Joy of Giving; K. Bisson

225 Preserving the Joy of Giving by Kenneth A. Bisson T he bicentennial of the u.S. Constitution served as a wonderful opportunity to ex plore the ideals of limited representative government with my oldest son, Adrian, who is in the third grade. He had enjoyed participating in a local writing competition called "Young Authors, " so I suggested we work together on a book. We drafted a children's book to convey some of the principles of the Constitution to an elementary reader. Our plot involved the adventures of some young Americans developing the rules for their friendship club as their parents gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. This was an exercise in explaining individual rights and how they need to be protected from an unre strained democracy. I realized how committed he was to those ideas when he came home from school quite irritated one December day. It is customary in our local school to have a Christmas gift exchange among classmates.

Those choosing to participate buy a $1.50 gift and, upon providing this for a classmate, re ceive a gift purchased by another student. As a way of expanding the joys of holiday giving, Adrian's teacher proposed the fol lowing to the class: They could make a chari table gift of the money they would otherwise spend on a classmate's gift and instead bring a wrapped discarded toy from home for a "junk exchange." She also proposed that each stu dent make a contract with his or her parents to earn the $1.50. The class accepted these pro posals, which seemed splendid to me. Kenneth Bisson, M.D., has practicedfamity medicine in a rural Indiana community for the past eight years. The joy of giving depends on its voluntary nature. Webster's dictionary defines gift as, "something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation." For gifts to exist, property rights must be recog nized. One must personally own the thing being transferred for it to qualify as a gift.

Thus, the students' decision to earn the donated money was important. The choice of the recipient must remain with the giver. He may delegate that choice (as with general contributions to United Way), but a transfer of property to an unintended recipient is not a gift. If you are delivering cash collected for United Way and a masked gunman "per suades" you to deliver it instead to him, you are not giving him a gift. Even if he uses the funds to help his needy family, you would not experience the joy of giving from such a coerced transfer. The harmony of voluntary giving becomes disrupted when the conditions of the transfer are coerced. It was the method of choosing the re cipient that bothered Adrian. The class sug gested the local Humane Shelter and African Famine Relief as potential recipients. Discus sion began and the advantages and disadvan tages of the alternatives were raised. Some wondered whether their "hard-earned" money would actually bring food to the hungry Af ricans. Apparently they had heard of diversions of some previous famine aid. Adrian was cer tain he wanted his gift to go to the Humane Shelter.

The teacher decided that the choice should be made by a vote of the class. The choices 226 THE FREEMAN. JUNE 1988 offered were: 1) all the money would go to the Humane Shelter, 2) all the money would go to African Famine Relief, or 3) the money would be divided equally between these two causes. Choice three received the most votes and the class was told that half of their donation would go to each cause. Adrian remembered from our book that "majority rule" is an inappropriate way to make many decisions. He felt it wasn't right for others to determine the destination of his gift. This experience had a happy ending. Upon Martha\5 8Iue6er~;es Adrian's suggestion, the teacher permitted each contributor to give his or her donation to either cause in the proportion each student preferred. The potential conflict that was produced by re quiring a collective decision was removed. The harmony fostered by allowing individual choice was restored to the holiday giving.

Adrian also became motivated to complete a writing assignment which was due that week. He used the idea from one chapter of our book to write his story. With his permission, I have reproduced it here for you. One day a long time ago there was a group of children who de cided to have a club. Their names were Tom, Martha, Bill, John, Re becca, and Jim. Soon it was time for a club meeting. So they all met by the clubhouse. Just as they were about to start the meeting they realized that Martha wasn't there. Martha had been in the woods picking blueberries. When she realized that she was late for the meeting she ran as fast as she could to the clubhouse. When she got there Tom saw the blueberries-and said, "Why don't we vote to see if we should eat Martha's blueberries." Everyone except Martha smiled and nodded. So Tom said, "Everybody who wants to eat all of Martha's blueberries raise your hand." Everybody raised their hand except Martha. Suddenly Martha cried, "It isn't fair to take away what I worked so hard to pick." After thinking about it for a while the others agreed and they finished their meeting.

From this experience the children learned that things should not always be decided by majority rule. 0 227 Beyond Hayek: A Critique of Central Planning by Tibor R. Machan I n his Critiqu.e of central planning, for its in ability and inefficiency in allocating so ciety's resources, F. A. Hayek summarizes his reasons for preferring the price system to the planned economy: The most significant fact about this [price] system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a meta phor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movements of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is re flected in the price movement. 1 For this reason Hayek holds that central planners could never allocate resources effi ciently or coordinate society's activities for the purposes which they wish to achieve. They would lack the price system, which carries the information throughout the economy that con tains the record of individual market choices.