When the topic of wealth redistribution comes up, as it did in a recent thread, it's common for people to start talking about philanthropy. "Why should we use the threat of FORCE from the STATE to make people help the poor instead of relying on VOLUNTARY ALTRUISM? Look at what BILL GATES is doing!" Well I hate to break it to you, but Bill Gates,
once again the wealthiest person in the world, is not really doing anything out of altruism. "The Giving Pledge," his charity effort, is popularly misunderstood (by design). The way charity works in the US is that you get to give money away instead of paying taxes. So Bill Gates gets to maintain a certain level of control over how this money is spent instead of just giving it to the government, and it still buys him GREAT PR.
This is just the most obvious issue, but if we start to look a little more closely, we find a lot of very disturbing things about his personal charity foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Take a look at a quote from
this article (emphasis added):
Gates' leveraged philanthropy model is a public-private partnership to improve the world, partly through targeted research support but principally through public advocacy and tax-free lobbying to influence government policy. The goal of these policies is often to explicitly support profitability for corporate investors, whose enterprises are seen by the Gates Foundation as advancing human good. However, maximum corporate profit and public good often clash when its projects are implemented.
For example, chemical giant Monsanto has partnered with the Gates Foundation, which reportedly works to suppress local seed exchanges and environmentally sustainable agricultural practices through its global agricultural charity work. Fraud-prone drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is a partner in the Foundation's work to leverage its own relatively fractional contribution to vaccination efforts, so that it centrally controls enormous world funds for purchase, pricing, and delivery of vaccines for world public health. And in its U.S. education reform charity work, the Gates Foundation has increasingly shifted its funding to promote market domination by its British corporate education services partner, Pearson Education.
The Gates Foundation, and Gates personally, also own stock and reap profits from many of these same partner corporations. In addition, the Foundation owns a profit-generating portfolio of stocks which would seem to work against the Foundation's declared missions, such as the Latin American Coca-Cola FEMSA distributorship and five multinational oil giants operating in Nigeria. These corporate investments, now moved to a blind trust whose trustees are Bill and Melinda Gates, are collaterally supported by the Foundation's tax-free lobbying and advocacy activities.
At the end of the day, THIS IS ALL A BRILLIANT MONEY-MAKING SCHEME CLEVERLY DISGUISED AS ALTRUISM. He's the wealthiest man in the world for a reason, folks. I may not like him, but on a certain level, you have to respect raw talent. The man is the Michael Jordan/Kobe Bryant of the business world.
As a side-note, another one of the big foundations behind the "education reform" movement in the US is the Walton Family Foundation -- that is, the same Walton family that founded Walmart. That might give you some insight into the real purpose of this movement (hint: it's not building better schools).
