Regulatory Compromise Chapter 3 Summary

The Regulatory Compromise (Chapter three) starts off with discussing the influence that philanthropy had on politics around the time of the World Wars and depression of the early 20th century. One of the problems that existed at the time was the urge to influence laws with the power of philanthropy. An example of this is the court ruling against the validity of a gift for women’s rights because it was aimed to “directly and exclusively change the laws”. During this time, being philanthropic in order to gain political power, or change laws, was not accepted. There were certain rules against whether or not a charitable gift was even considered “charitable” depending on the purpose it was meant to serve. One way that people found their way around this limit on philanthropy was to educate the public rather than directly influence the lawmakers, as the people had

Even today this is something that we want to be true, but it may not always be. If the wealthy had all the power to create laws, then our country would have been run solely by wealth. If this were to be true, the idea of eugenics, mentioned in chapter three, could have easily been carried out in America with things such as the spread of birth control use and the sterilization of those seen as unfit to reproduce. Today it is easy to recognize that the idea of eugenics is something to stay away from, but at the time is was considered a normal science. Eugenics was something that had the capabilities of changing the world we live in today. Personally, I believe that if it was not for the limitations that the Treasury Department had put on philanthropy in 1919, many people would have contributed to something much more evil than they had believed, and history would have been full of how Americans essentially carried out ideologies similar to Adolf