Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by kaonashi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

kaonashi·

It's more like

Step 1: Place fortune in a large tax-free foundation

Step 2: Invest that wealth as normal, but without the need to pay taxes

Step 3: Spend charitable funds in such a manner as to increase the value of investments from step 2

View on HN

Can you walk me through how it ends in anything other than Gates having given his money away through the Gates foundation? Also, for what it's worth (and I don't think this is even essential to the point), the Gates Foundation has an explicit mandate to spend down all reserves within 20 years of their death:

> Also announced was the decision to spend all of the foundation's resources within 50 years after Bill's and Melinda's deaths.[177][178][179][180] This was later lowered to within 20 years of their death.[181][182] This would close the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and effectively end the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

(source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...)

He doesn't 'give money away' no-string-attached. He uses the donations to control the way the economy deals with the externalities of capitalism. It's fundamentally anti-democratic for that share of the world's economy to be driven by the whims of one man.

It is, but perhaps unfettered democracy isn’t a great system in the first place

Not saying everyone needs to have the same level of say in the outcome of the economy, but there's a minimum below which the system becomes unresponsive to real human need and a maximum above which diminishing returns sets in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com