Zombie Foundations Threaten The Nation And All Of Creation

Authored by Michael Kochin via American Greatness,

As the tide of totalitarian wokeness recedes from the swamp, some of its ugliest and most toxic creatures will find refuge as employees or grantees of tax-exempt nonprofits. In our pluralist and democratic society, we must, to some degree, tolerate organizations with intolerant, inhuman, or wicked purposes, not least because we should have the intellectual humility not to judge every cause on our present knowledge. Who knows what valuable chemotherapy will come from the poison mushroom the Sierra Club is fighting to save?

True, we need, or at any rate must suffer, the plague of foundations—for fear of an unhealthy political monoculture in which our own miscues and misdeeds go unchallenged. That does not mean these foundations’ current powers and privileges should go unscrutinized. The Ford Foundation was set up in 1936 and now controls about $17 billion in assets, and long since passed out of the effective control of the Ford family. The Rockefeller Foundation controls a mere $6 billion but is so alienated from its roots in Standard Oil money that it is divesting from fossil fuels.

These foundations, and the endowed nonprofit sector more broadly, have been captured by a set of woke officers largely unsupervised by equally woke boards of trustees. They are globalist and frequently antihuman, but they benefit from tax privileges at the expense of the American people. The Ford Foundation has given hundreds of millions to Black Lives Matter and similar causes, and nothing to those whose homes and businesses were destroyed by BLM rioters. The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation pays anti-Semitic protestors on Ivy League campuses while claiming to be balanced because it funds the no less murderously intentioned astroturf organization, the Orwellian-monikered Jewish Voices for Peace.

We can’t and we shouldn’t make every rich man in America either blow his stash on drawing to inside straights and launching fast rockets or donate it to more humane causes. But we can require that all nontaxable foundations come to subserve the views of current donors, by requiring every entity in the nonprofit sector to spend down its endowment in a short period of time. At the moment, private foundations are required to spend 5% of their endowment a year. Given market performance, especially in inflationary times, that is far from sufficient to ensure that these foundations do not outlive the intentions of their donors and eat American civilization.

The Federal government should set a spending level sufficient to ensure that all nonprofits are disendowed in a reasonable amount of time. If a 20% required annual payout is not sufficient, we can try 25% or even 50%. If a foundation can’t find a way to spend that money within its alleged lawful purposes, no worries: it can just write a check to the IRS for the difference between what it managed to spend and the required payout. Our national debt is so large that Uncle Sam could swallow all the $1 trillion dollars or more assets of all the private foundations in America with barely a burp.

If the Feds want to be really cynical, the IRS can police the payouts to detect shifting of endowments through shell foundations while ignoring the looting of endowments by foundation executives. No great harm will come to the world from nonprofit vice presidents flying off to Tahiti in private jets with bags of loot and nostrils coated in white powder—we cannot say the same for the money these foundations have lawfully and conscientiously spent on the agendas they hold in good faith.

The Ford Foundation claims to have faith and fidelity to the American nation and pride in the broader American story and to serve, rather than subvert American democratic capitalism. Given its role in funding and promoting the hateful and mendacious 1619 Project, which sought to undermine our faith in America by teaching that Black slavery was the essential pillar of the American project, it is time to put that claim to the destructive test by watching it spend itself down to nonexistence.

The bloated nonprofit sector feeds off American wealth and abuses fundamental freedoms to undermine both liberty and prosperity. Time for some political chemotherapy…