For your information (I didn’t knew) the Giving Pledge is a initiative launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to ask billionaires to give 50% of their fortune to charity.
Thiel is now trying to convince is fellow billionaires not to sign it or to unsigned it because the money would go to “left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.”. 🫤
Admittedly, giving the money to the Gates Foundation isn’t ideal. There are better places to donate to.
Just… pay your taxes, particularly after we raise them on you in the near future.
It’s funny how a convincing argument for the ultra wealthy, against giving away their wealth to charity is “but you won’t like how they are going to spend it”. They want the appearance of being generous without actually giving up control of their wealth. They aren’t generous. They just want good PR, tax breaks, and power over others.
Clearly yes, Gates bought himself a large part of aid for development and made it a private thing. First it allowed him to push his vision of economical developement : more intellectual properties, more intensive agriculture, more proprietary software… Second it made it something that is owned by a handful of people who don’t have anything to justify to anyone.
After convincing the world that taxing them was inefficient they now keep their money for themselves. It is quiet sedition.
Buffet has continually said the US tax system is bad and he should be taxed more. But if the government won’t tax billionaires, using private money to eradicate malaria isn’t evil.
Not inherently, but an individual or small group of individuals (with no accountability) exerting control over how to disperse such large sums of money makes enormous waves across the local and global economy and can do a lot of damage even to the cause receiving it. What if the method Gates liked and decided to fund was the least likely to work, or was the least efficient solution, or what if he choose (knowingly or not) a corrupt organization to oversee the work? See what Gates’s funding of charter schools did to the public school system. Pour money carelessly (or with severe bias) into any special interest and it will inherently start to corrupt it and starve everything adjacent to it, especially in a capitalist society. The spending such large sums of money needs to be done carefully and democratically.
Unfortunately, if the government is corrupt and captured by private interests, taxes end up doing almost the same thing. With government at least there is usually some bureaucracy that can exert some control over the process. I guess it depends how thoroughly captured it is.
There so many “what if” statements that it invalidated your argument by sheer volume because it could apply to anyone in any scenario. There is no one who can guarantee the money will be best spent on the best by the best for the best reasons. But they are actively trying to solve problems like Malaria that have huge impacts on humanity with no profit on the horizon. What have you done to help people you will never meet with a disease you can’t cure?
Hard disagree. The problem is not that anyone could make a bad choice. It’s a matter of magnitude, and also of character.
These people have exploited countless people to obtain obscene levels of wealth. Do you believe that they are the best qualified person to decide how to use that wealth?
They have decided to take resources extracted from an insanely large fraction of humanity and unilaterally decided:
With no transparently obvious profit on the horizon, in this case.
I participate in the democratic process and use my vote and my voice to encourage responsible use of my society’s collective wealth to affect changes I feel passionate about and encourage others to do the same.
Those passions include preventing a small number of individuals from syphoning obscene levels and wealth and usurping the process to shower their pet projects will the same collective wealth I’d prefer society at large decide to direct.
This was already answered by Buffet when he said his taxation level was unfair. This is a situation where the people have elected a government which won’t tax billionaires so some billionaires used their money to cure malaria because the government wouldn’t tax them and do it.
Other billionaires build rockets and museums. Is that better?
This is not an answer. This is an explanation for why, right now, billionaires get to make those decisions - because they are allowed to accumulate so much wealth. That doesn’t speak to their qualifications or whether or not it should, ideally, be the ways things are.
No. Having rich fucks pick my personal pet projects is not my point. I thought I was making my point painfully obvious. Decisions about such vast quantities of wealth should be made democratically, not unilaterally.
This was your claim:
"Gates bought himself a large part of aid for development and made it a private thing. "
Gates didn’t buy it. The people elected government officials who wouldn’t tax billionaires. Instead of spending it all on rockets and monuments, he got Buffet onboard with curing malaria.
Are you also angry with Jimmy Carter for being a multimillionaire and building houses?