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Private money is what kicked off the National Parks system in the US. Glad to see this happening anywhere. I hope it stays in the public trust though.

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There are already tons of national parks in Europe, it's not like this is the first one.

Really? I thought it was Terry Roosevelt. Do you have a source?

It was Teddy. Via executive orders.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-theodore-roosevel...

He came way later - it began much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Park_S...

You have to look at the history of each individual park, some started out as government land and remained such, others were private resort islands, etc.

I suppose it comes down to your definition of kicked off. There were only a few lands protected as national parks before Teddy arrived and protected more land than any other individual has ever done.

But often with the support or lobbying of private interests. Generous souls like Lorrin A. Thurston of Hawaii, who would like you to remember him as the newspaper publishing philanthropist who used his wealth to promote his interest in volcanology and persuade Roosevelt to create the Volcanoes National Park. Which is true - in 1916, the park was established by Woodrow Wilson (helped by Teddy’s endorsement).

But the same kind of private interest taking an interest in the affairs of state has its dark side too: Thurston also was the author of the “bayonet constitution” which undermined the Kingdom of Hawaii's sovereignty, and formed the ‘committee of safety’ which enlisted the US Marines in a coup that overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani, and installed Sanford Dole (the fruit guy) as and President, and ultimately brought about the annexation of Hawaii.

I don't know the history, but if it's anything like the public libraries here (and several other institutions), a lot of it would have been bankrolled by robber barons trying to secure their legacy and avoid taxation. In other words, guilting rich people and threatening nationalization of their wealth works.

> a lot of it would have been bankrolled by robber barons trying to secure their legacy and avoid taxation.

Do you have a cite for that?

BTW, donating to charity is tax deductible. For example, if I donate $100 to charity, I can deduct $100 from my taxable income.

My choices:

1. paying taxes: I pay $20 2. donating to charity and deducting it from my income: I pay $100

I'm $80 worse off financially by donating to charity rather than paying taxes. As a tax avoidance scheme, donating to charity doesn't deliver.

That's a very naive understanding of how charities work. You don't donate to a charity, you donate to your charity.

Now, obviously your charity still needs to act as a charity so that money can't go back in your pocket but there are plenty of things the charity might spend it on that are in your financial interest and because you founded it, you likely have sufficient influence over it to make that happen even if you don't formally personally make its decisions.

Also, if you donate $100 in stock to a charity, that deducts your taxable income by $100 but it doesn't cost you $100 in income. Arguably a more egregious example for this is high art where you can create and destroy value through auctions (i.e. the value of your donation may be massively inflated compared to what you paid for it).

> there are plenty of things the charity might spend it on that are in your financial interest

How do you think Carnegie's libraries across the country benefited Carnegie financially?

The goodwill he garnered probably shielded him from costly scrutiny of his less savory business practices, for one.

I.e. the presumption of guilt.

No, he was definitely guilty. But if you do good things in recompense, it's easier for people to let it slide. As with modern antitrust, labor rights infringements, etc., it's not so much, "Are they doing it?", as, "Do we care enough to investigate and build a case?". Bankrolling a public good that politicians know need to happen but don't want to go through the political pain of appropriating funds for makes them care less.

Given that the US isn't a perfect capitalist system (i.e. what supports of capitalism often refer to as corporatocracy or crony capitalism) why would you assume that he didn't do the closest thing to illegal that he could get away with if it was most profitable to do so?

That said, the actual reason for his philanthropy seems to be fairly well documented: he did almost all of his philanthropy in the last two decades of his life (i.e. past what we would now call the age of retirement) and he was regarded as a shrewd business man up to that point and is now instead remembered as a generous philanthropist instead. So in other words, it was a very successful PR campaign to establish his personal legacy to survive his physical existence (i.e. "to secure his legacy" as the comment you originally replied to stated).

That said, he was also supportive of the ideas of progressive taxation and an estate tax, so the philanthropy may have simply been an act of last resort to part with his money when the government won't take it away through taxation. In that light it sounds more like his philanthropy aimed to meet the needs the welfare system failed to address. This is very different from the kind of philanthropy most billionaires (or "tycoons") get/got up to who are often very much against being taxed more (sometimes even despite publicly stating the opposite).

I might have overstated how common it was, after a bit of Googling.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/09...

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

Yellowstone National Park - 1872

Sequoia National Park - 1890

Yosemite National Park - 1890

Teddy Roosevelt - president from 1901 - 1909

Roosevelt's Time Machine was well known.

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