Hey, Neven -- check this out!
These 14 billionaires just promised to give away more than half of their money like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett
Fourteen billionaires announced they have signed the Giving Pledge, formally joining the 154 other billionaires who have promised to give away at least half of their vast wealth to philanthropic causes.
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http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/14-billionaires-signed-bill-gates-and-warren-buffetts-giving-pledge.html
Thanks for this, SMN, this is interesting. Maybe it's the philanthropy that interests wealthy people. But maybe it's also a sign that they know that their wealth could destroy society, like it always has so far. And of course, aside from a couple of insane lunatics like Mercer and the Kochs, that's not what most rich people want. But it doesn't matter what they want, as their money is the master over everything, even over them. It's their money that drives the system, as some kind of black hole, sucking everything into it.
That's why philanthropy looks very nice*, and half the wealth of billionaires sounds like a lot, but instead of voluntary, it would be much better if there simply was a hard limit on how much a person can own. To break that inanimate power of money.
Imagine all those billionaires simply having to give back everything above 100 million dollars. Every year. Now that would make a dent. But like we've discussed in the previous round, who gets to decide what is done with the money?
- Free education and healthcare
- Manhattan-style climate mitigation programme
- Rebuilding war-torn zones
- Rebuilding the soil worldwide
- Rebooting the space programme and explore/colonize the solar system
It would seem all that would become possible, if done the right way. There probably was some truth in that Randian Atlas Shrugged stuff. So how to circumvent that?
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* I haven't seen Bill Gates get any poorer from his philanthropy, and despite it he might live to see himself become a trillionaire 30-40 years from now. But maybe that's because his Foundation invests a lot in patent-related Pharma stuff (I learned that from a documentary on the Gates Foundation that I translated a couple of years ago, but maybe things have changed by now).