Hebron Academy, because it is tax-exempt, avoids paying taxes and, would prefer to continue not to. Gosh — who wouldn’t?

Ambrose Bierce, the author of “The Devil’s Dictionary,” describes a corporation as: “An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” A non-profit corporation, like Hebron Academy, might therefore be defined as an ingenious device for avoiding taxes.

A corporation, to be tax exempt, must be ” … organized for a public or charitable purpose.” But, because a corporation describes itself as non-profit and is organized for a public or charitable purpose, doesn’t mean it is providing for the poorest among us, and it doesn’t mean it is struggling financially and can’t afford to pay taxes. Private colleges in Maine — Bates, Bowdoin and Colby — charge for their product and they generate large amounts of money. Perhaps, because they don’t pay taxes, they can each pay their presidents, salaries in excess of $400,000 a year — an amount larger than the salary of the president of the United States.

In addition to the colleges, there are non-profit hospitals, whose directors receive even larger salaries. Everyone would like to get on this profitable tax-exempt bandwagon and, given sufficient time, perhaps everyone will. Even the NFL, which pays its directors millions of dollars in salaries, is a non-profit corporation. That is corporate welfare that doesn’t meet a means test.

The property and income taxes that academies, colleges and hospitals don’t pay must be paid by others; the others, of course are everyone else who isn’t tax exempt. Those include taxpayers on small fixed incomes who, even though they can’t afford to be, are themselves charitable. And on a comparative basis, they are probably more charitable. The important difference is that they are required to pay their real estate taxes and actually pay more than their share since the non-profits aren’t paying theirs.

If we were to design a government and its tax system, what possible argument would support somewhat randomly assigning tax exemptions? There might be persuasive reasons to give my church a tax exemption, but not everyone’s. I would advocate for the Salvation Army, but not for the Red Cross.

The choices wouldn’t be easy. It would be nearly impossible and there would be both mistakes and corrupt decisions. We might soon realize, it would be better to abolish tax exemptions for all organizations. Then, each of us would have more money from reduced taxes and we would be better able to donate more to churches and other worthwhile organizations.

Richard Sabine, Lewiston