by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Old money, new money, dirty money, counterfeit money, drug money - you got it, I'll take it.

There's a thinking that encircles each of those types of cash. Our megarich, for example, have an entire culture that includes such habits as talking condescendingly to waiters, as scribe-to-the-megarich Peter C. Newman once noted.

But there's a more noble philosophy meant to surround great wealth, as exemplified by the thinking of Scottish-born coal-and-steel baron Andrew Carnegie, once the richest man in America. He had such guilt seeing his fast-dying, soot-covered working bees that he vowed that his money would be devoted to the less fortunate.

Thus 90 per cent of his fortune went to good causes like libraries, and Carnegie shamed his ruling-classmates by announcing in his Gospel of Wealth, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced."

They should teach that book in elementary school. And yes, I am aware that in the past I've demanded that schools teach everything from contract law to lawnmower repair, but I mean it this time.

Carnegie's message is embraced by big rollers ranging from Warren Buffet to Bill Gates. But up here it's not so big, and particularly small in Quebec.

But it's important to guilt our rich into spending to fight deprivation rather than seeking solace in conspicuous consumption. They must be convinced into giving their cash up for the good of society (hey - one study shows that the altruistic live longer!) and the alternative is passing it onto family members. And how much greed is rationalized through the ol' "family security" excuse? If money just stays in the family the ruling elite gets further empowered and inheritors like David Frum and Conrad Black stroll around with entitlement complexes.

So while materialism runs rampant - you can't turn on a TV without hearing Jay Leno bragging about his fleet of cars or seeing starlets show off million-dollar necklaces - a lesser-known disdain for gaudy spending zooms under the radar, just like billionaire Sam Walton, who motored around in his beat up old Ford pickup.

In Quebec the rich have come out particularly wanting in the ol' wealth-distribution test. Five years ago Hilary Pearson chose to locate her Philanthropic Foundations Canada here because we're Canada's soft-underbelly of the wealth-sharing. "The reason we're here in Montreal is that we want to reach the francophone market," she says. "We have a few francophone foundations but there's not many."

Some of the largest Canadian private sources for cash for the needy are here in Montreal, like the McConnell Foundation, Canada's second largest. And there's been further improvement; she notes the largesse of a certain former cable baron. "We have the Chagnon Foundation. It started three years ago, and has a billion-and-a-half dollars of assets. It's a phenomenally impressive foundation."

Pearson laments federal tax laws that discourage people from launching such private foundations. Seven years ago, Finance Minister Paul Martin reduced capital gains taxes on shares for those giving to public foundations. Charitable giving shot up but restrictions have been maintained on private foundations. The fear is that the rich will manipulate their books for their own financial advantage, but Pearson says we should do what's done in the States: simply allow it and then police against abuse.

Another problem: our current common law definition of philanthropy is based on Elizabethan-era alms-for-the-poor that excludes the possibility of setting up, for example, a foundation for the rights of abused prisoners. "Political advocacy is a hot topic, it's a big can of worms. A number of voluntary sectors say [the current definition of philanthropic organizations] is archaic and must be changed."

Canada is home to about 8,000 philanthropic foundations that give to all sorts of causes, the most common of which is to education. It's a disproportionately small total compared to what the rich give to the needy in the U.S., although in Quebec, its tax haul, co-ops, tables de concertations and other paragovernmental organizations assume part of the role that philanthropic efforts achieve elsewhere. But as long as our wealthy residents don't consider Carnegie's notion of having a duty to the poor, our less well-off will continue to be Scrooged in the end.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca