Should charities support President Obama’s plan to limit tax deductions for charitable donations by high-income earners? Joel Berg thinks so. The executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH), Berg wrote as much in last Thursday’s Washington Post.

Tax deductions for charitable donations, he wrote, “are a highly inefficient way to fund social programs.” Moreover, “voluntary private charity is a less equitable way to solve community problems . . . In America, the government is the most legitimate voice of the entire community.”

Conservatives will have obvious and very well-grounded philosophical objections to the collectivist argument that Berg makes. To support his argument, he simply asserts (contrary to what we know about many famous philanthropists — James Smithson, for example) that the wealthy give only with ulterior motives.

When the wealthiest Americans donate to charities, they are most likely to give to universities, hospitals and cultural institutions from which they and their families may benefit.

James Smithson, for one, would surely disagree, but never mind that. Berg goes further. When the wealthy try to give back to their communities through educational, cultural, poverty-related, and other charities, Berg strongly implies that they actually do a disservice to everyone by choosing their own priorities over those of “the legitimate voice of the entire community” — i.e., faceless bureaucrats and demagogic politicians. What right do the wealthy have to direct their own money to the causes they support, when they owe their success to government anyway?

While many people assume that the rich amass their wealth on their own, the truth is that their business interests are almost always aided by public efforts such as roads, bridges and ports through which they ship their goods or public schools that educate their workforces…[I]t is wrong to give them unilateral power to decide whether their taxpayer-subsidized donations should go to, say, well-heeled operas or lavish care of pets rather than to organizations that meet more pressing communal needs.

Perhaps there are frivolous charities out there (I would not consider opera to be one of them), but just how efficient is government at allocating societal resources to solve community problems in the real world? Here is one way of thinking about it: Under current law, the federal government must spend no less than $6.06 billion in 2010 in direct ethanol subsidies — to say nothing of the billions in extra costs this will impose upon consumers. The “legitimate voice of the entire community” has thus decided (and if you understand Congress you know that it will not revoke its decision in this lifetime) that to subsidize the production and mandate the use of a fuel that no one would otherwise make or purchase is three or four times as important as assisting the homeless (the omnibus contained $1.7 billion for them). Spend a few minutes in Washington, and you will find that this is the way government decisions are usually made.

But set aside any problems with his argument. Berg is uniquely qualified to agree with President Obama that government should make the wealthy pay twice for their generosity, even if they already pay a higher income tax rate and the vast majority of the income tax. This is because the government, not private donors, provides most of the funding for Berg’s group. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, the last three years for which tax records are available, government gave NYCCAH $997,000, whereas other sources gave $930,000.

Moreover, the addenda attached to the group’s 2005 and 2006 IRS forms show that NYCCAH receives a negigible amount of direct support from individual donors, wealthy or not. For 2005, just $10,200 of NYCCAH’s $442,000 budget came from individuals. In 2006, less than $10,000 of its $772,000 budget came from individual donors. (The group did not provide a similar donor breakdown for 2007 with its IRS filings.) Of the private money that NYCCAH received during those years, nearly every penny comes from foundations, religious organizations, and corporations. None of those gifts to NYCCAH would be affected — not directly, anyway — by President Obama’s planned crackdown on private donors.

NYCCAH may well do excellent work. But if the group’s top salaried official wants to carry the president’s water, arguing implausibly that government programs are superior to private charities in dealing with community problems, he faces still another conundrum. His argument is really an argument against private charities per se. Shouldn’t he be lobbying to end the grants upon which his group survives — the ones that NYCCAH takes away from our efficient and effective government agencies that could better serve the public? Would it not be more efficient, more equitable, and more effective to dismantle NYCCAH and replace it with an annual expenditure of $600,000 in food stamps?