of a democratic society.
This raises, then, the matter of the rationale for tax-exemption eligibility of nonprofit organizations. That is, what is the fundamental characteristic—or characteristics—that enables a nonprofit organization to qualify as a tax-exempt organization? In fact, there is no single qualifying feature. This circumstance mirrors the fact that the present-day statutory tax exemption rules are not the product of a carefully formulated plan. Rather, they are a hodgepodge of federal statutory law that has evolved over nearly 100 years, as various Congresses have deleted from (infrequently) and added to (frequently) the roster of exempt entities, causing it to grow substantially over the decades. As one observer wrote, the various categories of tax-exempt organizations “are not the result of any planned legislative scheme” but were enacted over the decades “by a variety of legislators for a variety of reasons.”16
There are six basic rationales underlying qualification for tax-exempt status for nonprofit organizations. On a simplistic plane, a nonprofit entity is tax-exempt because Congress wrote a provision in the Internal Revenue Code according tax exemption to it. Thus, some organizations are tax-exempt for no more engaging reason than that Congress said so. Certainly, as to this type of exemption, there is no grand philosophical principle buttressing the exemption.
Some of the federal income tax exemptions were enacted in the spirit of being merely declaratory of, or furthering, then-existing law. The House Committee on Ways and Means, in legislating a forerunner to the provision that exempts certain voluntary employees' beneficiary associations, commented that “these associations are common today [1928] and it appears desirable to provide specifically for their exemption from ordinary corporation tax.”17 The exemption for nonprofit cemetery companies was enacted to parallel then-existing state and local property tax exemptions.18 The exemption for farmers' cooperatives has been characterized as part of the federal government's posture of supporting agriculture.19 The provision exempting certain U.S. corporate instrumentalities from tax was deemed declaratory of the exemption simultaneously provided by the particular enabling statute.20 The provision according tax exemption to multiparent title-holding corporations was derived from the refusal of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to recognize exempt status for title-holding corporations serving more than one unrelated parent entity.
Tax exemption for categories of nonprofit organizations can arise as a by-product of enactment of other legislation. In these instances, tax exemption is granted to facilitate accomplishment of the purpose of another legislative end. Thus, tax-exempt status has been approved for funds underlying employee benefit programs. Other examples include tax exemption for professional football leagues that emanated out of the merger of the National Football League and the American Football League, and for state-sponsored providers of health care to the needy, which was required to accommodate the goals of Congress in creating health care delivery legislation.
There is a pure tax rationale for some tax-exempt organizations. Social clubs stand out as an illustration of this category.
The fourth rationale for tax-exempt status is a policy one—not tax policy, but policy with regard to less essential elements of the structure of a civil society. This is why, for example, tax-exempt status has been granted to entities as diverse as fraternal organizations, title-holding companies, farmers' cooperatives, certain insurance companies, and prepaid tuition plans.
The fifth rationale for tax-exempt status rests solidly on a philosophical principle. Yet, there are degrees of scale here; some principles are less majestic than others. Thus, there are nonprofit organizations that are tax-exempt because their objectives are of direct importance to a significant segment of society and indirectly of consequence to all of society. Within this frame lies the rationale for tax exemption for entities such as labor organizations, trade and business associations, and veterans' organizations.
The sixth rationale for tax-exempt status for nonprofit organizations is predicated on the view that exemption is required to facilitate achievement of an end of significance to the entirety of society. Most organizations that are generally thought of as charitable in nature21 are entities that are meaningful to the structure and functioning of society in the United States. At least to some degree, this rationale embraces social welfare organizations. This rationale may be termed the public policy rationale.22
(a) Public Policy and National Heritage
The public policy rationale is one involving political philosophy rather than tax policy. The key concept underlying this philosophy is pluralism—more accurately, the pluralism of institutions, which is a function of competition between various institutions within the three sectors of society. In this context, the competition is between the nonprofit and governmental sectors. This element is particularly critical in the United States, whose history originates in distrust of government. (When the issue is unrelated business income taxation, the matter is one of competition between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.) Here, the nonprofit sector serves as an alternative to the governmental sector as a means of addressing society's problems.
One of the greatest exponents of pluralism was John Stuart Mill. He wrote in On Liberty, published in 1859:
In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of . . . the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations.
Following a discussion of the importance of “individuality of development, and diversity of modes of action,” Mill wrote:
Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others; instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.
This conflict among the sectors—a sorting out of the appropriate role of governments and nonprofit organizations—is, in a healthy society, a never-ending process, ebbing and flowing with the politics of the day. A Congress may work to reduce the scope of the federal government and a president may proclaim that the “era of big government is over,” while a preceding and/or succeeding generation may celebrate strong central government.
One of the greatest commentators on the impulse and tendency in the United States to utilize nonprofit organizations was Alexis de Tocqueville. Writing in 1835, in Democracy in America, he observed:
Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another. I have shown that these influences are almost null in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially created, and this can only be accomplished by associations.
De Tocqueville's classic formulation on this subject came in his portrayal of Americans' use of “public associations” as a critical
