The man who dies rich dies disgraced, said Andrew Carnegie, voicing a thought that is about as unfashionable today as any I can think of. On the contrary, to accumulate wealth, avoid tax, secure it for the future, find ways of squirreling it away, far from the grasping fingers of government, is held to be a virtue, encouraged at almost every level of society. We do not give easily.

Not that we have any lack of swaggering entrepreneurs in the Carnegie mould. We see them, these Masters of the Universe (perhaps not quite so masterly in these credit crunch days) accumulating their bonuses, trousering their share options, collecting their golden handshakes after a career that may, or may not, have significantly benefited their companies. What we do not see is the badge of philanthropy that their Victorian ancestors wore as a matter of pride.

There is scarcely a town or city in the land that does not bear the mark of a great 19th-century industrial patron. Think of buildings such as the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, the Cartwright Hall in Bradford - the list is endless, the motive in each case a desire by the local boy made good to put back into his community something of what he had taken out.

That sense of local commitment seems largely to have gone. We have global philanthropists like Soros or Gates, UK patrons on the scale of a Sainsbury or a Getty, but no great tradition of charitable giving at a humbler, and sometimes more directly effective, level. Whereas in America it is as natural as mother's milk to endow a local university or orchestra, in this country the milk of human charity has run sadly dry.

So it was striking to hear an American philanthropist, resident in Britain these past 24 years, talking about how she had inherited “the giving gene”. Carol Høgel has used the wealth inherited from her father, a Chicago-based industrialist and notable patron of the arts, to establish a fund, known as the Dunard Fund - named after her Highland cottage. Over the years it has nurtured orchestras such as the London Philharmonic, rescued the Edinburgh Festival from a mountain of debt, brought great operas, such as Peter Stein's Parsifal to Britain, helped to rebuild the National Galleries of Scotland. In all, she has brought £20 million of funding into this country during the time she has been here.

One might imagine, therefore, that a rare species of this kind would be cherished - that governments and councils, mindful of the benefits that they have gained through the extra tickets sold, the extra kudos gained, the millions of extra visitors pouring into the country and the money they have saved in the course of it all by not having to do it themselves, would take care to foster good relations with such a valuable source of present and future generosity.

One might imagine wrong. When, last year, the Treasury began setting out its plans to tax foreigners who are not domiciled in the UK, no recognition was given to those who were embedded in British society and had made substantial contributions to it. Indeed, the reverse happened. Wealthy residents from abroad were portrayed routinely as tax dodgers, drawn to a country where their earnings from abroad escaped taxation. Stories about multi- millionaire hedge fund managers, paying less than £1,000 a year in the UK and salting away £10 million in the Cayman Islands, began to circulate. When friends of Ms Høgel wrote letters to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer on her behalf, they received no reply.

The £30,000 that she and the 130,000 or so “non-doms” in Britain will now be required to pay, after Alistair Darling's March Budget, may not sound much, but to her it looks and feels like a fine imposed on her for having the temerity to bring her wealth to Britain. She sees it, rightly or wrongly, as “hostility” on the part of government, a symbol of a “destructively spiteful, philistine attitude”. And so she is off, uprooting from her home in Edinburgh, resigning from her many boards on orchestras and galleries, returning to America, where, she says, “an individual with involvement in, and charitable contributions to, visual arts and classical music is valued, not punished”.

You cannot, of course, implant that giving gene in a nation not notably blessed with it. But what you can do is to show that it is valued. Introducing a tax scheme that would encourage giving rather than penalising it is not a hard thing to do. Britain is about the only country in Europe, for instance, that has no incentive scheme for those who would like to donate works of art to museums or galleries during their lifetime.

There are tax incentives when we pass on shares or land or buildings, but not works of art. We have done nothing to encourage “lifetime legacies” - the idea, common in the United States, whereby those who want to leave their possessions to their local town or to the nation can derive tax advantages during their lifetime rather than after their death. As the art collector Anthony d'Offay commented recently: “We are good at rewarding the dead. We're not so good at encouraging the living.”

What seems to lie behind this is an almost ingrained suspicion of the rich - a sub-Calvinist belief that those who have accumulated wealth are to be punished not rewarded. We should begin to reverse this by remembering Carnegie's other famous saying - that “surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community”. And then we should give the rich a really good reason for doing something about it.

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