Tax and charity in the UK

Tactical Philanthropy links to this fascinating news article from the UK: 

Richer taxpayers should pay a surcharge of 10 per cent on earnings or investment income above £150,000 a year if they do not give the same sum to charity, Frank Field, Labour's former welfare reform minister, said yesterday.

The aim was "to encourage richer taxpayers to embrace the responsibilities of wealth" in a new philanthropy reminiscent of the Edwardian era.

Of course, one thing about the Edwardian era is that the government wasn't funding public health, poverty relief and pension programs at anything near the level or scope of what we see today. 

The evolution of charitable rhetoric on this score deserves a whole book of its own--the government justified created its own social support networks because individual charities were ostensibly unable to engage in widescale systemic relief, but now that the government has been doing this for a while the dramatically higher tax rates needed to fund these programs are no longer associated with the charitable semantic domain.  Instead, government funded has shifted into the domain of necessity, and so a person's tax payments no longer count as a sufficient contribution to the common good.  Yet a mandatory payment to a non-governmental charity remains charitable, a value set that itself includes personal freedom.