JLF’s Jon Pritchett offers his view of the growing debate over your right to privacy when it comes to your support of nonprofit groups.
The political left has been making an argument that nonprofits should disclose their donors. Their argument for “transparency” is superficially appealing but completely antithetical to individual liberty. Transparency is what citizens in a constitutional republic require of their government. Citizens, on the other hand, are constitutionally afforded privacy. The government has no business knowing what causes its citizens support.
Whether you support the arts, religious organizations, the NRA, social justice groups, free-market think tanks or abortion rights groups, it’s nobody’s business. No citizen should be compelled to disclose to whom it gives or how much it gives to private, nonprofit causes. When advocates for donor disclosure talk about how important it is that we have donations “out in the open,” we should all beware. That talk is a euphemism for putting your name and mine on a government list, which will also include your address. What harm could come from the government publishing a list of every private citizens’ donation to causes for which they care?
If a private citizen decides he/she wants personal donations to nonprofits made public, that is most certainly his/her individual prerogative. But make no mistake, that’s a decision over which government should have no authority. The words of Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, are as timeless as ever, “our rulers can have authority over our natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.”
Rather than focusing on transparency in the private affairs of individual citizens, our focus should be on ensuring our government is more transparent in its disclosures to us.
Learn more about donor privacy here.
