In ancient civilizations, rulers and nobles exchanged gifts as acts of prestige. Only when Assyria came into existence, and it had a need for manpower and resources to feed its conquering empire, did gifts turn into taxes and government become overlord of its people, who were moved from place to place and told what to do by elites.

The legacy of centralized government being ‘smarter’ than communities evolved from there. If 10 families in a town want to build a road to improve commerce, it is almost a certainty that one family will object. They know if they don’t pay but nine others do, they still get the benefit. The ‘free rider problem’ exists in charity also. Some people know they can get things for free. In both cases, the argument goes, government is better to handle it. If government collects money from everyone, and then builds a road, no one is a free-rider. If California wants to give out free health care to everyone, no one is a free-rider.

It means charity is no longer needed. We see it in the politics of modern times. In America, people who identify as left-wing give more of their money to politicians(1) while the right gives more to charitable causes. The left believes more in the ability of government to help.

Ethiopians bring their tributes before a pharaoh in Ancient Egypt.  Photo by Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images, provided by The Conversation

Some people do exploit that. The ‘free rider’ problem has been long studied but most humans understand that sometimes others need a hand. A recent article says The Christmas Spirit was with us long before Christmas, it is as old as modern humans.  It is probably true that charity became formalized with the advent of Christianity, making charity one of the greatest gifts of Christmas, but on the local level it existed long before that. It was just gifts rather than a “tax write-off” or a “benefit” depending on how you vote.

Christianity and then Islam hundreds of years later formalized the obligation of giving, caritas and zakat respectively, but like governments that give out free health care, those are not selfless acts – a centralized panel is then deciding how you behave…or else. So government and government-funded NGOs (2) hurt individual charitable giving. Before civilizations, it was friends and family helping friends and families.(3)and that gift-giving predates charity by a lot, even hundreds of thousands of years in Africa. Sure, Africans loved to trade in people so women were often among the gifts, but to them it was still a point of prestige.

Once organizations took over, be they charity or government, gifts changed. Europe gives ‘gifts’ to groups that advocate political goals, like Swiss Public Eye or Greenpeace, but not all NGOs can get money. It is political dispensation, not selflessness we associate with gifting.

What does that mean for Christmas? Santa was always the ultimate centralized charity, to me, yet like government he takes a lot of credit for what everyone else has done.

I may sound cynical on the premise of Santa, but when my kids were young they had one gift from him because it taught them that gifts were not always about exchange. A parent they could give something back, an old guy at the North Pole couldn’t receive anything in return, and that has a positive message just like the cookies I baked for my friends this year.

If cats baked Christmas cookies, they would look like this. Instead, I bake them like this to give to friends to show I care.

NOTES:

(1) In the 2024 presidential election, 300% more. This has been the case ever since Senator Obama reneged on his promise to honor public financing limits knowing his opponent, Senator John McCain, whose name was on the campaign finance reform bill, would not do the same. With no limit, he easily raised double the amount of Republicans. They do seem to believe money buys elections because when they lost in 2016, they claimed $16 million in Russian propaganda caused it. Yet data show otherwise. Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg spent $500 million campaigning in 2020 and only got one electoral vote – in the Democratic primary. In 2024, Vice-President Kamala Harris spent over $1,000,000,000 and still lost.

(2) An alarming number, when you consider non-profit groups in Europe directly funded by government and the US government’s policy of ‘sue-and-settle’ arrangements with activist groups where the settlement is basically just a government payment to environmentalists. President Trump has people thinking he is really going to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tinker with American food and medicine but the hope is he will dismantle the mechanism whereby enemies of science are funded by progressive administrations who claim nonsense like that a common weedkiller that acts on a biological mechanism only found in plants can give a mouse Alzheimers and that not only are plants tiny people but mice are tiny people too. And so weedkillers should be banned.  

(3) As I wrote above, it was the Assyrians that changed culture from rich people giving out gifts to enhance their personal prestige to government demanding resources and people to increase power. It is why the Assyrians not only created the first government in the world that was about itself, they created the first government hated by everyone.