'Tis the season for giving. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Pancha Ganapati, Hogmanay, Newtonmas, or simply the end of the Gregorian year, odds are that you're giving gifts some time around now.
We give gifts to family; we give gifts to friends; we donate to charities; and many people also offer up tithes to religious institutions. Gifts to individuals are a social bonding ritual — the voluntary transfer of wealth signals a lower bound on the value we place on a relationship, and the giving of non-monetary gifts in particular can be a way to communicate our level of personal understanding — but these do not apply to charitable and religious donations. For those, I think an entirely different explanation is required: We pay voluntary taxes in order to help create the world we want to live in.
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