The Dumbest Donation You Can Make

In today’s culture, where virtue-signaling billionaires love to proclaim they’ll “give it all away,” we must pause and ask: To what end? What purpose does inherited wealth serve? Is it merely a lucky windfall for lazy descendants? Or is it something far more sacred?

I argue today that inheritance is not just permissible — it is necessary. It’s how families grow stronger, freer, and more capable with each generation. Donating your entire fortune to charity may sound noble, but it is often a colossal mistake — philosophically, morally, and economically.

Capital Is Meant to Be Preserved — And Grown

First, let’s define terms. Capital is not just money. Capital is productive wealth: businesses, skills, land, tools, and the accumulated know-how to make them flourish. In a family, capital can take many forms, but financial capital is the backbone of all the others. Without it, nothing moves forward.

Now here’s the kicker: Diluted capital cannot grow. That’s not an opinion, it’s a financial fact. When you distribute productive assets to strangers, you forfeit any ability to shape how that capital works. It’s no longer your family’s seed corn. It’s bird feed.

This is one of the biggest fallacies in the “give it all to charity” movement. The money is scattered and not focused. It’s deployed without any feedback loop of love, responsibility, or vision for the future. Capital given to a faceless nonprofit is rarely preserved. It’s consumed, and the family who built it loses the opportunity to steward it into something even greater.

The Catholic Case for Inheritance

Catholicism has a deep and nuanced view of wealth, which too many interpret incorrectly as anti-capitalist. But Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), the seminal encyclical on labor and capital, lays the groundwork for a proper Christian understanding of private property and inheritance.

Leo XIII wrote:

“It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten… He can do this more effectively if he owns productive property.”

Ownership, then, is not an indulgence—it is a duty. And the continuation of ownership across generations is not greed, but charity rightly ordered: charity that begins at home.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church also recognizes inheritance explicitly:

“The family must be helped and defended by appropriate social measures. Where families cannot fulfill their responsibilities, other social bodies have the duty to help and support them.” (CCC 2209)

But the ideal is for families to be self-sufficient. And how does that happen? Through the passing down of wisdom, virtue, and yes, wealth.

Libertarians Get This Right

Now, the libertarian view on inheritance is often caricatured as defending “spoiled trust fund kids.” But the reasoning is quite different if you read thinkers like Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard. It’s about private property rights and the continuity of stewardship.

Rothbard put it plainly in Power and Market:

“If Smith has the right to give or bequeath his property to Jones, then Jones has the right to receive it. Otherwise, Smith’s right is a mockery.”

In other words, if I work my entire life to build something—a farm, a business, a portfolio—I ought to have the right to choose who carries it forward. And naturally, the people I love most and know best are my children. Why should some bureaucrat or NGO get a say in that?

To deny this right is to deny agency. To tear the connective tissue between one generation and the next is to sever the very idea of progress. Libertarians, like Catholics, may disagree on many things, but here they agree: family is the basic unit of society, and wealth must be preserved within it.

The Myth of Charitable Nobility

There’s a smugness to the billionaire who declares he’ll leave nothing to his kids. It makes headlines. It makes for a good TED talk. But does it actually help society?

Many of these charitable gifts go to sprawling organizations with massive overhead, opaque leadership, and questionable effectiveness. Rarely do they plant trees under which anyone’s children, least of all the donor’s, will sit.

Moreover, the donor deprives his children of money and the chance to become stewards. And that’s a word we don’t hear enough.

Stewardship is not about partying on yachts with inherited cash. It’s about learning how to preserve, grow, and direct wealth toward productive ends. It’s a moral responsibility. And it’s best learned by doing, under the guidance of a parent willing to teach it, not just accumulate it.

Inheritance as Evolution

Inheritance is not just about passing on assets. It’s about passing on vision. Every generation has the chance to refine the values, strategies, and strengths of the previous one. This is how families evolve — not just biologically, but economically and morally.

Look at the great families of history. The Medici weren’t saints, but they built a banking empire that funded the Renaissance. The Rothschilds weren’t angels, but they created the capital markets that made the modern economy possible. These were multigenerational projects.

Now imagine if Cosimo de’ Medici had said, “I’m giving it all away to the Florentine Humane Society.” You’d never have heard of Michelangelo.

Inheritance matters because it creates continuity. It allows for the compounding of not just money but also meaning.

A Legacy Is Not a Liability

Of course, heirs and heiresses may abuse inherited wealth. But the answer is not to abolish it but to raise better heirs. To model restraint, responsibility, and generosity rightly ordered.

The great economist and Catholic convert Wilhelm Röpke put it best:

“Freedom without inheritance is a contradiction. It means condemning each generation to begin anew.”

In other words, if we want our children to be free—to pursue greatness, to take risks, to create — then we must give them not just encouragement but tools: capital, wisdom, and, yes, land and money.

That doesn’t mean no accountability. That doesn’t mean no structure. But it does mean a default assumption that the family should retain its wealth and not squander it on false virtue.

Wrap Up

The impulse to give is good, but it must be rightly ordered. Charity that begins at home is not selfish — it is sustainable. It builds future givers, strong families, and strong societies.

Inheritance is not a fluke. It’s not theft. It’s not luck. It’s a birthright that fathers and sons and mothers and daughters should treat with reverence and strategic care.

So next time you hear someone brag about giving it all away, ask: Who will grow that capital? Who will carry that torch?

If they don’t have an answer, maybe wealth was never the point.