Carnegie would approve

Andrew Carnegie, one of this country's most famous self-made men, believed in giving away his money, and he had a lot of money to give away. He believed that it was his ticket into heaven.

Of course, he didn't want the U.S. government taking his money and distributing it to the poor through social programs. That's what charities were for, and he wrote The Gospel of Wealth to make damn sure everyone knew it.

He would have fit in pretty well with the crowd at the Clinton Global Initiative 2006, or as Robert Reich has described it, Bill Clinton's "second annual tycoon-fest."

If none of you have ever checked out Reich's blog (way at the bottom of my blog links, where a practitioner of the dismal science belongs), you should:

I remember a day when government collected billions of dollars from tycoons like these, as well as from ordinary taxpayers, and when our democratic process (in its own halting way) decided what the billions would be devoted to. In 1960, the moguls of America paid a marginal tax of 90 percent on their incomes (an effective rate, after all deductions and credits, of over 50 percent). In 1960, over two-thirds of Americans trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time, according to survey research.

Now, the moguls pay an effective rate of maybe 10 percent of their incomes – none at all if they have clever enough accountants and lawyers who park it in tax havens. And they're richer than ever before in history. Today's release of Forbes Magazine's annual list of the richest 400 Americans is made up solely of billionaires -- for the first time.

And what about government? Now, according to surveys, two-thirds of Americans don’t trust government to do anything right.

So nowadays, a few hundred of the moguls devote some of their billions to doing good things, and we applaud their generosity.

Maybe I’m overly sentimental, but I preferred it the old way.