Democrats want us to believe that there is some cohort of “good billionaires” who can be relied upon to fight for political progress. But as the right-wing turn of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk suggests, this is nonsense.
could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything. I guess you could argue that as you throw money into saving lives, the low-hanging fruits get picked and the cost rises, so you can never saturate all the charities - but this is a very weak argument, since saving 99.99% of all the people in the world from hunger or poverty would be about as good as 100%. Just because there’s diminishing returns doesn’t mean it’s a doomed cause.
That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything.
Charities do more than throw money at problems. This doesn’t contradict my point at all, which is that money alone is not the answer–if it was, all of these problems would have been solved by now.
As a small example, you can’t truly solve world hunger until you achieve world peace, and you can’t buy peace.
I’m not entirely disagreeing with you on your point, I just want to add that we have a system of cronyism. The taxpayers of a country (more specifically, the US) spend, say, $60 billion to feed an underdeveloped African country or area. The trick is, the politicians have made sure that the money goes to specific contractors. Who have no investment in using the money to solve the problem. Their business model is now not to fix something, it’s to make sure the program stays funded so they can keep getting $60b to do $3b worth of work with $2b worth of materials and make a profit and donate to more political campaigns to keep doing this on a greater scale. That $60b directly applied with government labor and government supervision would have worked. But cronyism prevented it at every step.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
It’s just not that simple.
That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything. I guess you could argue that as you throw money into saving lives, the low-hanging fruits get picked and the cost rises, so you can never saturate all the charities - but this is a very weak argument, since saving 99.99% of all the people in the world from hunger or poverty would be about as good as 100%. Just because there’s diminishing returns doesn’t mean it’s a doomed cause.
Charities do more than throw money at problems. This doesn’t contradict my point at all, which is that money alone is not the answer–if it was, all of these problems would have been solved by now.
As a small example, you can’t truly solve world hunger until you achieve world peace, and you can’t buy peace.
I’m not entirely disagreeing with you on your point, I just want to add that we have a system of cronyism. The taxpayers of a country (more specifically, the US) spend, say, $60 billion to feed an underdeveloped African country or area. The trick is, the politicians have made sure that the money goes to specific contractors. Who have no investment in using the money to solve the problem. Their business model is now not to fix something, it’s to make sure the program stays funded so they can keep getting $60b to do $3b worth of work with $2b worth of materials and make a profit and donate to more political campaigns to keep doing this on a greater scale. That $60b directly applied with government labor and government supervision would have worked. But cronyism prevented it at every step.