Philantropy and Governments for the good of the poor
I posted this as a comment on MartinVarsavsky.com:
If Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and a few other billionnaires can donate less than 5% of their stock value per year. 1-2 billion per year out of their Fortune of 30 or 50 billion dollars if they sold all their stocks today, which they might not really be able to..
So to what I understand, it’s kind of like that they are just donating the interests on their fortune to charity. Which is great. And since they have to sell off a billion or more of their stock to do that each year, that might be the most and the fastest they can do it.
The thing I’m trying to say is that if a few american billionnaires can be convinced to voluntarilly donate even 5% per year of their personal fortunes towards international Charity, that’s great. I don’t know if it’s gonna be enough to rapidly solve all the problems in the third world and in the developped countries themselves which is said to be caused by capitalism or bad governments.
Basically capitalism hasn’t cared for the poor since there is no fast return on investment when one invests in the poor. And the Governments haven’t cared much for the poor neigther because solving their problems and seeing the positive results on the actions take takes longer than the election cycle.
Although most people in our societies probably seriously care about the poor and really want the poors problems be resolved even if it has to take some industry-wide long term investment movements and some visionary multi-election cycle political action. Hopefully some individual philanthropists can convince the industries to get together and invest in the poor populations and hopefully some courageous politicians will take the initiative for some big governmental investments in getting rid of the miseries.