Hacker News Reader

Comment by newt0311 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. An editorial on the NY that makes significant economic sense and goes against the liberal ideology. This is a first.

On the op-ed itself. I don't understand why anybody considers profit evil if said profit is not gotten through fraud or coercion. Exactly what is so evil about making money? Furthermore, all donations to charity are completely voluntary and private. Whether for-profit charities are evil or not is not something to the public at large to decide. We have no business passing judgment on any charity unless we happen to be one of the donors (and even then, clauses from their contracts apply). Lastly: if I was donating to a charity, I would not be concerned by how much they got in profit or how much their chief manager was paid. I would be interested in what I was giving them money for: how effective they were is helping the people they claimed to help.

View on HN

Give NYT some credit, in the sense that not all their opinion pieces must adhere to some liberal ideology. As you mentioned, it is an "op-ed", not the NYT editorial board. The very fact that they have William Kristol as a regular columnist says a lot.

There are two unresolved issues that I see.

Contributions to for profit companies are not tax deductible. This may cause some to give to other charities instead.

Not for profit charities are required to disclose financial information. Sites such as Charity Navigator allow you to investigate such charities. For profit charities are not subject to such regulations.

> I don't understand why anybody considers profit evil if said profit is not gotten through fraud or coercion.

For example, Marx said that more capitalism logically leads to subsistence living conditions for the workers. He gave arguments for this. I think they are mistaken, but if you are wondering why people think profit is evil, that's a reason. Marx said that without fraud or coercion, and just free trade, most people will have very bad lives.

And, yes, obviously one can live in the US for a lot less than minimum wage, and be doing a lot better than the subsistence conditions Marx had in mind from his own time period. So Marxism is blatantly, factually inapplicable to the US (whether that's b/c Marxism is false, or b/c the US has been saved by it's non-pure capitalism with govt intervention is not obvious just from the plain facts). Why people are blind to this is a tough question.

I think the capitalism today is much tamer than the capitalism was in Karl Marx's time. My opinion is based on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_wealthy_historical...

At the time of Karl Marx, the wealth built by Rockefeller and Carnegie is such a big portion of wealth of the U.S. But when you look at Buffet and Gates, they are not as wealthy as Rockefeller and Carnegie were. Besides Gates and Buffet's influence on political power is limited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com