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Comment by marcosscriven | Hacker News Reader

While what he's doing is obviously good, I am uneasy with the whole idea that one man accumulates so much wealth in the first place, and then decides as an unelected individual what's best for a country. Having said that, I'm not sure i have a particularly good answer to this conundrum.

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Who care if he represents nobody if he do good for humanity? There are lot of people in this world that represent a people and they're rotten.

Think about the representatives that you elect to represent your district. By default, they only represent the interest of your district, but not for the greater good of everyone. Otherwise, they get booted out of office for failure to do their job.

Bill Gate can afford to care about poor people, because he doesn't have to answer to anyone. It's not his job to care for India versus the United States. It's not his job to hate China. It's not his job to ensure 25 years in technological advantages against America's enemies.

It took me a while to understand this thinking but deep down I end up agreeing -- this "billionaire with a heart of gold" is far too familiar to the old thought of "I hope the king is just." We far too often end up with billionaires using their money to fund an art museum or ballet for rich people in the name of charity (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_...).

Living in Seattle, I have several friends who work for the BMGF and there is no doubt they are doing amazing things in the world, but the cynic in me still struggles with the idea that a private citizen is deciding how and where to help. Not like I particularly trust the state to handle these decisions either though, so I am normally left scratching my head and just trying to appreciate the good that Gates is ultimately doing.

We far too often end up with billionaires using their money to fund an art museum or ballet for billionaires in the name of charity

You seem to imply that there's something wrong with funding art museums or ballet... The world needs beauty in it, and if people choose to support the arts in a way from which we all benefit, that's great.

Whether art or disease prevention, applying resources over time in a serious and committed way is probably going to be a big help. The BMGF seems to be doing just that.

It's not just about the money. It's about applying it thoughtfully over a period of time.

"The world needs beauty in it, and if people choose to support the arts in a way from which we all benefit, that's great."

Try to explain why the world needs beauty to the folks of the slums of Mumbai and how this beauty will benefit them. I would imagine that the only beauty that they could find is a hope that their children will get out of the slums and live a more fortunate life than there are now.

I always find it strange that to raise money for charity, sometimes an event (ball, art auction, concert etc) is needed to generate the donations. Why not just short cut the event and just collect the donations?

Art is a pervasive part of all human cultures. To imply that people in the slums of Mumbai somehow can't appreciate beauty is to rob them of their humanity.

There's no reason why you can't support both hunger and arts charities.

Why not just short cut the event and just collect the donations?

Because events punctuate people's calendars and bring people who want the same thing together and gives them a chance to socialise and network.

I find it weird that you start out complaining that the poor don't have enough joy in their life, then turn around and complain that joy shouldn't be used as a mechanism to help them.

I completely agree that we need beauty -- I love the concept of funding the arts, but there have to be priorities and we should not rely on the rich to make decisions like this in the name of charity.

I quoted it lower in the thread, but I LOVE the poem by Gil Scott-Heron "Whitey on the moon" --

"A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the moon"

A civilized society doesn't rely on the generosity of philanthropists in order to take care of the most vulnerable among us. We all pay taxes to keep the rats off sister Nell.

How anyone (including the super-wealthy) choose to prioritize how they spend and give away their money, it absolutely is their choice. I personally think Bill Gates has done a better job than almost anyone.

"A civilized society doesn't rely on the generosity of philanthropists in order to take care of the most vulnerable among us."

I don't understand this sort of logic. One of the hallmarks of civilization is people doing the right thing even when they aren't forced to. People marvel at the fact that you can lose your wallet in Japan and get it back without anything missing. Yet you're saying that using force to provide for the needy is somehow more civilized than people doing it voluntarily?

In a civilized society, we'd be able to solve our social problems without forcing people to do it. I'm not sure how we get there, but that's the society I'd rather live in.

I would like the kind of society that doesn't need to use force (legitimized by democratically elected representatives, checks and balances, and the rule of law) to take care of the most vulnerable, but I have yet to see any precedent of that. You mention Japan, they have a very pervasive government social safety net.

Places without effective governments? Those are places where people do routinely die of hunger and treatable disease.

From what I hear Japan doesn't have a good social safety net.

See eg. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/world/asia/08japan.html?pa...

I would be happy to be wrong and the situation might have improved very recently?

That's an interesting article about how Japan hadn't yet extended their safety net (which includes things like universal health care) to the emerging edge case of mass layoffs, something that just didn't happen in their culture before.

"the number of nonregular workers took off after an easing of labor laws in 1999" .. "To receive unemployment insurance, for instance, workers must have held the same job for at least a year, effectively excluding most temporary workers" .. "Today, 34.5 percent of Japan’s 55.3 million workers are nonregular employees"

Sounds like a third of the workforce is at risk of homelessness any time their temp runs out and this has been developing for ~ 15 years.

The world needs beauty

Platitudes don't make for a very good argument. How about this: "What if all the aristocrats who sponsored Mozart had pissed it away so that people in Bombay had cleaner latrines?" Exactly. Total waste.

Replace "private citizen" with "human being" and see if this criticism still makes sense.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that super rich individuals are themselves a product of their surroundings, and the country that supported them - and that just maybe Bill Gates shouldn't have so many billions. Maybe a lot more of it should have gone to the US in the form of tax, and then the US as a whole could decide how best to help fellow humans around the world. I think you can probably discount this though as the rantings of a 'socialist European'! I never used to be so lefty in my twenties...

I think India needs the exact opposite of Bill Gates. We need more people who could industrialize India fast, employ masses of people and take us on par with China,Japan or Korea. India's political parties are left leaning and try to create Europe styled social safety nets. We need more libertarians and rich lobbyists and more copies of Ayn Rand to change the anti - laissez faire policies we have. It's still easy to start a Delaware C corp over internet from India than to register for a local corporation in most states.

I'm fairly uncomfortable that one elected individual with a fairly small majority and a rapidly declining approval rating can decide what is best for a country. Consolidation of power is the problem; not the method by which it is acquired.

And yet a committee of hundreds is if anything worse (I'd certainly trust any one of my representatives individually over the full house), and some decisions really do need to be made at the national level.

Neither being elected nor success in business necessarily qualifies someone to decide what it best for a country.

And I don't consider one worse than the other, each will be biased in a different way.

Out of interest, what does qualify someone to decide what is best for a country?

As if elected officials have the best interests of the poor in mind? I suppose they do, but only to the extent that they need those votes. Whether the goal of the Gates Foundation is simply to redeem the image of Microsoft's founder or not, it's doing great things for the downtrodden of the world. Perhaps that's what people like Nobel and Carnegie had in mind as well, cleaning up their PR image. But that's the cynic's view.

If you listen to Bill Gates speak, he honestly sounds like someone who believes what he is saying and backs it up with money. As a rich man he certainly has other options. He can give a hearty "fuck you" or even a dismissive "I don't care" to the world and take his money to do whatever he wants. You know, like Larry Ellison or dozens of other people who've made their fortunes off the public.

You think philanthropy is an evil conspiracy of the wealthy? :)

Having said that, I'm not sure i have a particularly good answer to this conundrum.

Well, let us know if you do. The speculative opinions of message board nerds is as important as someone who became wealthy and is putting his money where his mouth is.

People voluntarily gave their wealth to him.

He was able to acquire wealth because he was able to take risks that most people wouldn't, because of his wealthy background. And if you trace back far enough, most old-money families acquired their wealth through violence (or at least the patronage of a ruler who acquired their wealth by force).

Do you mean people who bought MS software, or other billionaires like Warren Buffet who gave money to the Gates Foundation?

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