Chuck Feeney: a billionaire who gave it all away
irishtimes.com
irishtimes.com
Only other similar philanthropy I've ever seen - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-08/three-mys....
:(
Here's a better link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140514054305/http://www.busine...
I am fully supportive of anyone who wants to Kickstart content corpus purchases and then give that to the Internet Archive for WayBack inclusion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney#Duty-Free_ShoppersThe institute he set up Atlantic Philanthropies has very recently closed it's door in Ireland having completed its mission.
Ah found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMcjxe8slYI
“the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor” - what a great thing to say. Where are these great men?
Consumption tax is the same for multimillionaires and for people who have 3 part time jobs and struggle to feed their family.
Then, imagine that you put a massive consumption tax for cards, for instance. What happens when the car of the 3 jobs guy is broken?
Also, how do you decide which products are the products that rich people buy and which are the products for "the poor"?
Congress did that by price - specifically, by imposing a 10% Luxury Tax cars over $30k.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_tax#Luxury_tax_in_the_U...
And do you really expect every millionaire / billionaire to do this? I'm afraid numbers are against you, that's why this appears in a newspaper: it's a rare event.
Finally, why let a few rich guys decide where the money goes? I think it would be better if the money was given to the government, so that the people can decide where the money will be useful. I'm not sure all of this guy's money went to good causes (you can check his Wikipedia page).
Pretty sure a worker at Mercedes or at VW will oppose free of cost public transit in Germany. I have met old people whose only income is their Social Security check advocate for "small government" that does away with all the safety nets in the US.
Of course, we disagree with how governments spend money. If we all agreed, we wouldn't need a government. All in all, a charity cannot replace government safety net.
I suppose that's as good definition of democracy as any.
The whole purpose of democratic governance is to deal with a political situation where most people disagree.
Yes, there are smarter people than him but how many of those people have Vision he has plus the ability to execute it?
As far as I'm aware, Musk can and does pay tax on his earnings
In fact you see some private contracts which are exactly like that NASA contract: "We want to pay you to create a much cheaper product than we can already buy, and here are some early progress payments so you don't have to finance it yourself."
You may think this is a moot point, that's totally fine. The difference between subsidies or not is important to others.
It's sad to see many people cheering at "philanthropist" billionaires while thousands or millions of unknowns people in the world ran their business while letting go of the opportunity to become rich by paying fair wages, or not patenting drugs or technologies or not adopting other aggressive tactics like cornering markets & so on.
In human history, when people like you attempt to force wealthy individuals to hand over their wealth, the country stagnates, and the ambition and intelligence move to other nations that have better social systems built by ambitious men, and the nation gradually rises.
Finally, why do you think "the people" or the government is an efficient instrument for ensuring charitable interests are met? That's really silly
The rest of us here aren't exactly looking for handouts; on average I'd say HNs do pretty well. However we can appreciate the many ways income tax helps support a functioning society.
High income and high estate taxes exist in the same world as wealth and I think they should be higher than they are now - the wealthy use considerably higher resources than the rest of society, and it requires extreme stability in society to even keep and maintain wealth which people in the US take for granted.
The comment did not say anything of that nature, he's describing a hard cap on wealth.. what would that number be? 1 million? 5? - "limit[ing] the wealth in the first place to ensure that everyone get its share" - this is the ignorance of a mob with torches.
Phones to make 911 calls from and cars for the police to drive over in were built by American entrepreneurs who became wealthy. It's part of the system. They did not take value out of society to become rich at it's expense - they were not perfect, but there was a significant net gain. If Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg is forced to liquidate 99% of their ownership in their company tomorrow because the guy above me thinks "I want more money, it's not fair he has more than me" to himself and builds a set of quasi-logical ideals around that and those ideas take root, then we begin declining as a society. The system always needs to be re-balanced and kept in check, but having a maximum bank account is not the answer.
You interpreted this as "hard limit", I assumed they just meant limit using tiered tax brackets (i.e. status quo). And, I assumed this is what you assumed.
The top-level comment in this thread advocates zero income tax; it's clear now this is not a position you are defending. My bad.
That said, I fixed your original comment...
"If you don't want to be a machine in multiverse where some AI has considerably more resources, training examples, and optimizations than you... with accounts holding more Ether and funded by AI who gamed ICOs... and something something something, dark side... then power down"
My thoughts on this change quite often, but if we were in a situation where we had a hard limit on wealth I think there should still be the chance to accumulate it, and the people who did the best that year get an award for it. Just to keep the incentive there. It's not like someone who has over 100 million in the bank is putting in the effort just because they want more things.
If you want to do good, donate your company to your employees.
Him having to go to the Bahamas to sign everything away means he profited a lot from tax "optimization".
Clear enough?
Bases N, served. https://www.google.com/search?q=chuck+feeney+tax+evasion
Peruse at leisure.
The question is: did he end up keeping more money now, than he would have, had he just kept everything and paid the due taxes? The article seems to suggest that, no, he didn’t.
> “Chuck hates taxes. He believes people can do more with money than governments can,”
Yeah, join the club.
From reading your posts it seems like you jumped to a conclusion without understanding the situation.
I assume you’re volunteering to be the first person in history who pays more taxes than they have to?
Great that he gave away his billions to people he decided worthy; a shame he didn't let democratically controlled governments decide.
Or, the few people who have accrued enough wealth that they no longer need government support - and can afford to purchase a large amount of available public messaging to say this.
I find it literally impossible that a single person's decision could be a better way of allocating funds than a (proportional) government's decision.
For example, take two simplified cases:
1. He makes a lot of money, and as a direct result of his fortune and generosity, he can effect [1000 employees * 10 years] = 10,000 man-years of charity work
2. He works directly at a charitable institution and performs 30 direct man-years of charity work, but makes no appreciable amount of money to multiply his efforts
If you're interested in a better explanation of this with regard to charity, I would check out Singer's book "The Most Good You Can Do", which is an exploration on the theory of effective altruism.
That's like saying "If you work to buy a house and food, why don't just build it instead along with a garden in the back and not work?" To which the answer is it is cheaper to do what you are best at and sell the surplus to buy all the houses your new money can afford.
You're literally creating value. You're then capturing some (but not all!) of that value you created, and rather than doing what some people do (use that value only for yourself), you're giving that value to charity.
That is the wrong line of logic. Many people who have a lot of money are/were not interested in making money beyond what it would take them to have a decent life.
They never made money. They made something else and that something, by consequence, generated a lot of money. For some of these guys the amount of wealth created satisfied a different need, perhaps some measure of impact, but it was never about accumulating wealth in the first place.
As Chuck Feeney said once, it is their call what the rich do with their money, but they will get more satisfaction giving it when living than when dead. “Besides,” he added, “it’s a lot more fun.”