If philanthropy wasn't a scam then the top 25 list of billionaire philanthropists wouldn't look so damn sad.
There are people worth a couple of billion right next to people worth nearly 100 billion. And the most high profile ones are also the ones blatantly abusing the power their donations yield (the fucking gates).
Philanthropy doesn't work. Taxing it and using the money for society works and would honestly probably be pretty good for the economy. Go kill some dragons and use the gold.
@rune Disagree. I think marginal dollars to governments are bad—they will probably use them to subsidize failing banks, or pump money into the military-industrial complex to kill brown people with ever-more-fancy drones.
I also think the first sentence in the previous toot is a non-sequitur: It doesn't strike me as plausible that doing good should lead to looking not sad (although I also claim that billionaire philanthropists look quite happy to me).
I would support taxing billionaires and giving the money to the poorest people in the world directly (à la GiveDirectly). Giving it to governments strikes me as a bad idea.
@niplav it's impossible to answer this many sentences in toot format.
@rune Fair enough. I now slightly regret being "the billionaire defender has logged on" :-D
@rune
Additionally, giving money to people in developed countries goes way less far than giving it to people in developing countries. The difference in wealth & income is just very stark (if you earn more than 10$ an hour you're in the richest 10% of humanity &c).
Could you give an example of billionaire philanthropists abusing their power?
I don't recall a concrete incident from the philanthropists I'm thinking about (Dustin Moskovitz, Bill Gates). SBF I concur did abuse power.