Ignore the pagan parts (that’s what I do)…
The bottom line comes at the bottom:
Fundamental Rules for Giving
1. Never sit on boards of directors for organizations that finance programs or individuals who are destroying the moral foundations of the free market. This means virtually all college and university boards. Never lend an aura of respectability to the enemy.
2. Never offer open-ended support to any organization. Put time limits or money limits on the support. This keeps the bureaucrats on their collective toes.3. Never sit on more boards than you have time to monitor. Monitor the outfits.
4. Fund projects, not people. Check out the results before funding additional projects.
5. Never fund a project that could be profit-seeking, unless you are an investor. Non-profit projects should be bankrolled only because they are important, but the market demand is low.
6. Endowments should not be provided for ideological organizations: education, research, publishing, etc. Endowments may be suitable for medical and charitable (direct giving) organizations. Endowments sever the bureaucrats from the donor’s goals.
7. College presidents cannot be trusted. Alumni associations are worse.
8. Never try to buy phony immortality by erecting a building with your name on it and your ideological enemies inside it, undermining everything you believe in. Better to finance the guys inside; let rich fools with no firm convictions finance the buildings with their names on them.
9. Never give money to bureaucratic group charities that distribute the money among many outfits. These are too conventional, too bureaucratic to accomplish very much. Finance higher risk, innovative experiments, project by project, since they might accomplish something unique.
10. If you believe in a project, see if you can get another well-heeled potential donor to get involved. Spread the risk around. Offer matching grants. Only a few projects will ever succeed. They are like new business ventures. Business ventures fail all the time; at least the market weeds out failures. Non-profit failures can go on for decades.
11. Fund many projects, not one with a big pay-off. You can never be sure where the big payoff really is. The bigger the payoff, the more likely the failure. Get them started, but refuse to fund them forever. Or save your big money for a project that proves its worth. Little turkeys become big turkeys when subsidized. Cut them off early. Seed money is not greenhouse money. Avoid greenhouse subsidies.
12. Better to give ten outfits a hundred thousand each than one outfit a million. Outfits that get a million dollars have to hire too many bureaucrats to oversee the money. Make them run lean.