Ned's Economist this week features a story on a meeting of a few dozen plutocrats, deciding how to give away their ill-gotten gains: read, gains flayed from the backs of workers and shareholders. Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg, et al have amassed such obscene levels of lucre that they are trying to find ways to 'give it away' for the 'benefit of society.' Now, no doubt many of Ned's friends think we should applaud such public spiritedness on the part of our betters: but we do not. Rather, we decry and condemn a society in which it can be thought appropriate to concentrate wealth in so few hands, and then trust them to give it away in the best interests of society. We feel they usually do a pretty poor job, often setting up 'foundations' headed by family members, toadies or lickspittles, which have the authority to give vast sums of money to causes that stroke the monumental egos of these plutocrats, and incidentally help them avoid taxes. For example, we understand that Gates is funding arcane programs in Africa while there are hundreds of thousands of men, women and children living under bridges and in shelters in this country. Moreover, our jails are filled to overflowing with so-called 'criminals' whose crime is smoking a gram of crack cocaine to escape their dreary, meaningless lives, here in The Greatest Country That Ever Was In The History Of The Universe. At the same time, states which have built these jails are slashing spending on higher education, and forcing our kids to take on trillions of debt, that they will likely never be able to repay. So, let's start trying the novel idea of fixing our own house first.
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