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Said no one ever.
The truth is that this is a fantastic use of the money and no politician would ever have used it more effectively.
The counterpoint to this is zoning rules. Sometimes you actually want the people who are furthest away from local problems to set policy. There's no new housing in major metros because wealthy landholders vote in people who set policy to prevent construction. After all, more supply means lower home prices. Setting that policy at the top allows for global optimization - nobody in DC cares that a building throws a two inch shadow over your park for half an hour during the vernal equinox.
The reality is both approaches have pros and cons.
Ditto with individual direction of funds. There's no reason to think all individual directions of funds are local let alone globally optimal. An individual or two can use their money to halt progress like the Kochs do, and the Murdochs do. This one is great. However, one data point doesn't make a trend, and there's no reason to think this individual act is representative of directed contributions.
That said this is a lovely gesture and I appreciate it.
This is a problem specific to a type of federalism where wealthy people have more political power than regular people. If each renter had equal political power to each landholder, the landholders would be a political minority and would not be able to influence policy in this way.
When we talk about theoretical improvements to our political systems, it is often useful and I think usually necessary to consider that more than one change would occur at once. If people like where these changes would get us, we can then bring them in to one policy platform and advocate for the change needed to achieve those goals.
There's the old Churchill quote "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Autocracy is extremely effective in some circumstances and absolutely atrocious in most. The public should have some say in expenditures of this size - and if our current government has grown too corrupt to be trusted with that expenditure than that's a separate problem that we also need to solve.
There will always be inefficiency and corruption - but the more eyes and transparency we have the more we can combat that corruption.
Compared to the billionaires who currently steward our money? Absolutely. For example, I just flushed a toilet and I'll never have to think about that shit again, except perhaps to marvel at how it may one day fertilize shade trees in my city.
It's not your money.
It's not my money.
It's their money.
Do something productive, and you may get rewarded too, rather than engaging in the politics of resentment and envy.
Only because our society is setup to grant it to them. It need not be that way. That billionaires deserve such outsized reward is dubious at best.
The issue of effectiveness shouldn't come into play at all. In a society with any modicum of freedom, I should be able to decide what to do with my resources. Why should I (or anyone else) get to weigh in on whether she gives her money to this college or goes to Vegas for a (really amazing) party? As long as she pays her taxes, she should be free to use the rest for whatever she wants. If the issue is whether she pays her taxes, then by all means we can tighten whatever loopholes exist but after all is said and done, people should be able to do whatever they want with their wealth.
Also, legislating billionaires out of existence is impracticable. People would simply put their resources into other vehicles that shield against the law. We would end up in a cat and mouse game that used up resources with dubious benefits.
Money supply is a zero-sum game - yes, you can print more, but that devalues what exists in circulation, so the have-nots remain the have-nots, and the haves remain the haves.
I think the existence of billionaires is absurd, and a giant red flag indicating that this in fact is a broken system. No single person should have command over such a disproportionate amount of resources, if only because not a single person can possibly choose well how to employ such resources.
Money is violence (in that it compels people to do what they otherwise wouldn't) and billionaires are grotesquely mega-violent individuals.
I don't agree with this. Wealth is created everyday. If I start a SaaS business and grow it to become a billionaire, there does not need to be an equivalent loss of wealth anywhere else in the society.
> not a single person can possibly choose well how to employ such resources
What supports this assertion? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. My argument really is that how you spend your wealth is none of my business after you have satisfied your obligations to society (which we collect through taxes).
> Money is violence
Hard disagree. Violence is violence. There are lots of ways to compel people to act that are non-violent. Famously, Mark Anthony foiled a coup with a speech. The Pope has enormous influence without having any tanks, etc. I am really against the use of language to make unfounded logical leaps in argument.
That said, this is he most compelling argument I can think of ie that billionaires have enormous influence over society. It undermines the concept of "one man, one vote". The counterargument is that this concept has never really been true (and cannot be true). All societies have people of influence and that influence is gained in many ways (religious standing, military prowess, good works, hereditary ties, oratory, notoriety, skullduggery, etc). These are intrinsic to human society and cannot be removed. Those people with influence will always have disproportionate impact on the direction of society. I guess it comes down to a value judgement of whether we want money to be one of those things that generate political advantage (for example, most western democracies have removed the ability to wield physical violence as one of those factors that provide a political advantage)
Wealth grows, production increases the wealth of everyone around you. If a few people hoard all of the money, they're not putting that money to useful work and those that do do this will make all the returns (which is why people don't really horde money, it's all being used in the form of investments in businesses).
Take that to its logical conclusion: where is the line? Are you not allowed to donate $50 to a charity of your choosing because The Government knows better? There's plenty of reasons to hate billionaires but this one doesn't seem sound.