Just last week, Gates himself was arguing that he and other billionaires need to be paying significantly more taxes.
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-gates-billionaires-significant...
It's undemocratic, but is it actually worse? Looking at the results of democratic processes, I'm not so sure the answer is yes. Democracy optimizes for the popular, the sensational, the scandalous. The hard work on the ground that Bill & Melinda put in doesn't square with that model. The public has the attention span of a toddler; they just aren't captivated by a decades-long vaccination and prevention campaign against malaria or river blindness.
This is my biggest critique about charities, but if there are transparent rules and processes that can be fixed. But in general, I think the govt would be a in a better position to serve their people than charities would.
Now look at the top 10% (minus the top 1%). That's the income range of $100-350k. They have 25% of the U.S. income--$4 trillion. In Europe, these folks are taxed like rich people. In Germany, individual income above 52,000 Euro is taxed at 42% (the highest marginal rate is 45%). In the U.S., these people have been redefined as "middle class." The tax rate is just 24% up to $150,000. If you taxed these folks as the Germans do, you could raise maybe half a trillion dollars in extra revenue.
Talking about the tax rate of billionaires is a red herring. It's not tax cuts for billionaires that are keeping us from increasing NIH spending, etc. It's tax cuts for ordinary rich people.
This is just the federal tax rate. What about state taxes? What about cost of living? Healthcare?
On the other hand, they have funded studies that try to dispel that global warming is real, and they have been accused of having undue influence on colleges they give grants to.
There are also billionaires who use their fortune to actively influence politics (in a way that is probably mostly beneficial to themselves - such as the Koch family supporting Trump). There must also be lots of billionaires who, just by passively remaining billionaires and taking no broader responsibility, add to the problem.
I'm making no judgement - here at least - on whether Trump is an idiot or not.
Instead of trying to tackle problems of wealth inequality in such a roundabout bureaucratic way, why not just start directly dividing income up more evenly with your employees to begin with?
Until he acts it's just marketing.
There's a huge number of examples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_compa...).
Essentially, if you think of government subsidies to private companies as assistance in making profit (which happens often when a government wants to promote a certain industry, even if it's only in form of a tax cut), having commercial companies to take care of common utilities is a way to assist the government paying for those utilities.
That was the key point of the original discussion about Gates' money and rising inequality, so the example is very valid.
Most of the time it's because these companies are government-approved monopoly (no other company can enter the market) or because they're heavily subsidised using taxes (no other company can enter the market practically because competing against someone who you fund at the same time is impossible and because the prices are below the actual expenses) and are actually losing huge amounts of money. Typically railways all around Europe are not profitable at all.
Volkswagen is a very special case, but you're partially right. I'd say it's an exception to the rule though.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "social needs" here. you could be referring to a specific level on the mazlow hierarchy, if so, I'd like to know why you pick this specific level as the benchmark. or you might be referring to some more vague concept of societal needs.
the particular definition of "needs" is very important to the validity of the quoted claim. if basic or "social" needs are defined as some absolute standard of living, this will be increasingly easy to fulfill as society grows richer.
I very rarely see anyone talking about needs this way though. instead, the definition of needs seems to move as people at the top grow more wealthy. it seems more likely to me that, as long as billionaires exist and live lavish lifestyles, people will never agree that their needs are being met.
If we only allowed people to do the things that everyone approved of, we wouldn't actually allow people to do very much at all. Freedom, art, society, and speech would all suffer.
Meaning when people start voting in policies that "tax the rich", you will probably be considered one of "them" by the average working class American.
Look no further than the new tax code that basically hurt the "rich" in places like CA and NY.
2) We impose many restrictions on use of money. Some things can't be bought at any price; others already have restrictions (e.g. campaign contribution limits). Are all of these inadmissible?
I'm not saying this is the case I Bill Gates but I'm not sure of any other way to encourage risk taking at the bottom except the promise of obscene wealth.
The problem with relying on philanthropy to fund the public good is that we the people are counting on the philanthropist to have goals that align with our goals. Imagine a world where the top two richest guys, instead of deciding to use their wealth to fund vaccines and education, used it to fund warlords and dictators. We could have just as easily gotten that dice roll instead of the Warren Buffet and Bill Gates world.
This is ostensibly one of the reasons "we" choose to democratically organize a government to fund the public good: So that we're not so reliant on the whims of a few rich people. It's to avoid the nightmare scenario where the worlds richest person decides instead to use his money for evil. Not saying that government can't use their power for evil, just that, at least in theory, we can vote in new government. We can't vote for different World's Richest People.
Actually, you did get that dice roll too. Look up the house of Saud.
You can't get the tax deduction by donating money to organizations that haven't passed through this review process.
It is intellectually lazy and moot to say everybody is free to do what they want with what they have (be it money or not) because that's not how we live nor want to live.
A proposal to take from an inidivual for the greater good can be worth a discussion. Just crying out for extremist, reality-ignoring individualism is not an acceptable comment worthy of HN, in my eyes.
Please, let's discuss proposals, but reasonably and with thoughtful arguments, and not with "? It's his money that he actually decided to give away why should you or I have a say in it?".
AFAIK, France is currently collecting ownership tax.
The USSR and North Korea suck because they are autocratic, corrupted regimes, not because of single aspects of how they run their economies.
But even beside specific examples, if we decide that it is a good thing, then we can introduce new law.
http://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ID/Netherlands-Individual-Income...
As an abstraction, I like to think of money as crystalized human effort. Society makes decisions by the power of individual behavior in aggregate.
A bunch of people buy a ~new thing~. Over time and at scale, society creates a river of money towards the ~new thing~. Its depth and breadth calibrated to reward other people for working towards bringing that ~new thing~ to society. Entrepreneurs gather marketing, sales and laborers to build a village by the river. This is society's intuitive understanding of business.
Society's intuitive understanding of competition between villages is that it occurs as an innovation arms race. Lower prices, better products are the result.
The experienced village builder learns that the best way to win is to divert the river into a cave and build a moat around the entrance.
Patent portfolios, information asynchrony, non compete employee contracts, vendor lock-in, yearly subscriptions, Byzantine government regulations and a hundred other things deepen your moat.
These kinds of moats improve your margin -- but in a different way than what society is used to. It isn't resulting in better products at lower prices, it's making competition more difficult.
Other experienced builders try to take a tiny drop from every river, for every transaction. They're starting to build their villages vertically and profit from the organically grown river network. Exploiting insider knowledge on the foreign exchange market, transaction fees, whatever.
These kinds of businesses intercept money that would normally return to society when the people in the villages go home.
The village builders have begun consolidating and moving upstream, getting closer to society. Society has BENEFITED. Their desires are now easier and faster to fulfill than ever before!
And yet.. society (remember, people in aggregate) is starting to get weary. Most people are restless and anxious, despite full employment, stock market blowing up, etc. Your average person can feel the reservoir getting lower, while other people are filling lakes.
"U.S. consumer spending rises; savings drop to 10-year low".
Money is power. Your average run of the mill person is slowly shifting from a belief in the Virtuousness of the American System, Land of Opportunity to one of Powerlessness within inevitability of whatever that system hands you.
Ultimate power is derived from a mandate from a masses, and most people on some level know that! They just feel like they're strapped in to a slow motion train wreck, and they're afraid of how it's all going to end.
Just my opinion on why people might have the audacity to discuss and critique how some billionaires spend their money.
In this case the cause they 'care about' is getting the most good out of each dollar. We have to ask why democratic/government giving does not have the same goal. Answering this question may very well lead to the conclusion that having some non-democratically controlled donors is better for everyone.
Buffet, Gates etc. always say they should be taxed more but I haven't heard of them actively supporting candidates and causes that will actually do this. If they really want it to change they have a lot of power (money) to influence politicans and help make it happen.