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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

It seems you can't be charitable without someone telling you you should have given more or given to someone else.

Spending money on good causes is great. That's to be definitely something to be encouraged. Putting all of the decision making about which causes are 'good' in the hands of one individual, or a small group of very similar individuals, is very, very bad. That's how entire segments of society get ignored.

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US federal budget for 2018 is ~4 trillion. Bezos has just donated 2 million. If that’s really your concern then you should try to keep things in perspective.

> US federal budget for 2018 is ~4 trillion. Bezos has just donated 2 million. If that’s really your concern then you should try to keep things in perspective.

I think you mean 2 billion.

Yes, of course, you're right.

To me it seems like philanthropists generally do a much better job spending money well than our government does. They don't tend to use it to bomb other countries, they often consider the lives of foreigners as important as the lives of Americans, and being able to ignore pork barrel considerations makes their projects more efficient.

The money spent by philanthropists is small compared to the US budget so they aren't in any way a replacement for the welfare state. But what money they do spend seems to go a long way.

I suspect that, at least partly, that's because philanthropists can choose their battles. They don't spend money unless they can see there'll be a good outcome. They can leave the high risk problems and "lost causes" to the government. Consequently governments will always look worse even if they actually do a good job elsewhere.

That's certainly true to some extent. But sometimes the right thing to do is to not get involved. In the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis[1] Medecins Sans Frontieres and other private aid groups pulled out when they realized that their money was going to buy guns for Rwandan Génocidaires. But the UN thought they had a mandate to help refugees no matter what and in the end we had the Congolese Civil Wars which were much, much worse than the refugee crisis could possibly have gotten on its own. You can say that they weren't foreseeable and I'd agree but it's easy to imagine the Hutu forces managing to retake Rwanda and finish their genocide, for example.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_refugee_crisis

How small is this group?

I find myself solving problems with capitalism and simultaneously donating 5-10% of my net-income.

I also dont see life being any worse than 'before' for any classes. 'before' being 15 years ago.

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