I’m sure Buffett and Gates are doing it for other reasons. But generic_billionaire donating paltry amounts of money is just buying goodwill from the public, other rich people, the local community, politicians, etc. A rich person donating 1% of their wealth each year may be donating a lot in absolute terms but very little relative to what they have
And when someone donates a lot of money, we just say they are buying PR and have calculated the ROI like the terrible capitalist they are, with zero evidence at all this is the case.
It's like running a company nowadays and wondering why your employees have no loyalty. Yea, maybe you're the one group that has acted honorably, but 90% of your peers have been rat bastards and you can't be surprised if the average person assumes you are too
Rather, the entire capitalist system, tax loopholes, and corrupt politicians have lead to increased disparity between the rich and poor.
I'm fine with the claim that some people who create value and are net-positive, such as many of the rich people, absolutely should have significant wealth.
However, they should not have the level of wealth they have now, wealth that is enough to feed every homeless in their cities for centuries, wealth that could house and clothe the needy for decades....
We should not have loopholes like the estate tax reductions which mean even after they die, their family line can greedily clutch onto the money for generations to come, creating a severe class divide.
Just because we are angry with the system does not mean we all think rich people are innately evil.
Also, we have all the evidence we need to condemn the current distribution of wealth: the current distribution of wealth is self-evidently disgustingly bad.
Preferential attachment in the absence of proactive redistribution leads to accelerating inequity.
As you know, too much inequity undermines democracy.
If we want a Liberal, democratic society, we need progressive policies. Some mechanisms to offset windfall profits, level the playing field. Debt jubilees, entitlements, UBI, Keynesianism, something.
While I'm (very) sympathetic to "late stage capitalism" rhetoric, I think it's besides the point. Inequity predates capitalism and won't be remedied by eliminating capitalism.
The actual statement is "The gap between the rich and poor is widening".
Of course the rich will be rich. That's a tautology.
They don't have to be rich at the expense of the rest of society, which is where we're at now.
Yes, that's correct. What, you think Bezos and Ma are genius visionaries for coming up with the idea of buying things on the internet? A democratically managed worker's co-op could have accomplished the same things as Amazon and Alibaba with almost none of the disgusting exploitative labor practices and wide scale human suffering.
I give a higher percentage of my income to charitable causes than any of these "philanthropists" and I manage to not waste an insane amount of money on a disgustingly wasteful life of luxury at the same time, but for some reason I don't have an army of sycophants defending my every action on the internet.