The Senate Finance Committee’s top two members — Democrat Max Baucus and Republican Charles E. Grassley — teamed up today to introduce legislation that would provide money to help small and medium-sized charities get training and management assistance.

The legislation, introduced as an amendment to a national-service bill now being debated by the Senate, would provide $25-million over five years to a “Nonprofit Capacity Building Program” within the Corporation for National and Community Service.

The amendment would “strengthen small charities around our country, especially where resources are scarce,” Senator Baucus of Montana, who chairs the finance committee, told his colleagues on the Senate floor. He said it would allow groups to get training, for example, in how to manage their finances, raise money, fill out tax forms, work with new technology, or plan long-term budgets.

UPDATE: And it looks like it’s passed, as of today. Woohoo! See here and here.

1. San Francisco
2. New York
3. Boston
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia
6. Seattle
7. Washington, D.C.
8. Long Beach, Calif.
9. Los Angeles
10. Portland

Switch out Long Beach for Minneapolis, and that list packs a formidable punch.

Business schools teach us that goods and services are good for society, that when people buy and sell things they increase their personal utility. The notion comes from basic economic theory and it finds its way into every business discipline. It justifies commerce by identifying a social contribution: value created through trade. In this convenient theory, every transaction makes the world better; every profitable business contributes to society simply by virtue of its existence.

Economists will tell you that this theory is too simple, that it ignores externalities like pollution and omnipresent realities like government regulation. But somehow these complications don’t find their way into dominant business logic or core business curricula. Somehow MBAs get stuck with a remedial economics that ignores environmental and social costs and regards regulation with disdain.

Is it any wonder that managers seek unregulated markets and pursue them blind to the consequences? Is it any wonder that leaders act purely in their own self-interest? They’ve been taught that doing so is the best way to contribute to society. They’ve been taught that doing so is their job.

This crisis will not be solved by the addition of ethics courses. Too often, such courses perpetuate the same logic described above. If we are serious about teaching responsibility in business education, we need a curriculum that reflects the real world context in which business operates, including its social and environmental consequences and the necessity of regulation for maintaining competitive and transparent markets. Instead of training MBA’s to lead in a hypothetical world of simplistic economic theory, let’s train them to lead in our world. It’s time to get real.