Putting Bill Gates on the Spot (i.e. Everyone Is Potentially a Heretic or a Sinner)
23rd February 2018
n the annual letter about the state of their philanthropic foundation released earlier this month, Bill and Melinda Gates answered “ten tough questions” that they get commonly asked. The Gateses are honest and cheerful in their responses, and the letter reveals more about their critics than it does about them.
“Why don’t you give money to fight climate change?” they are asked. The Gates Foundation underwrites undeniably worthwhile causes that most liberals would support. The Gateses want to end malaria and HIV, give poor kids a better chance at a good education, and empower women around the globe to provide for their families. But if you don’t tick off every liberal cause, then you are not really committed to change, apparently. Why not global warming, too? (And what about nuclear disarmament and saving the whales?) The Gateses point out that “in philanthropy, you look for problems that can’t be fixed by the market or governments. The clean-energy problem can be fixed by both.” But this is unlikely to assuage critics who believe that the market is the problem, and philanthropy is just there to help government.
“Why do you work with corporations?” others ask. Bill Gates replies: “We think poor people should benefit from the same kind of innovation in health and agriculture that has improved life in the richest parts of the world. Much of that innovation comes out of the private sector.” What does it say about the people asking these questions that they need Gates to explain that corporations make money by creating products that the rest of us find useful, and that make life better?
The Left is a mish-mash of interest groups who all have a single Burning Issue on their minds, and — while they generally agree that other Lefty special interests are more or less on the same team — their own particular Burning Issue is obviously to even the casual observer the most important. Hence, whenever one of their Lefty fellow-travelers seems to be suggesting that there is some higher priority than the actor’s Burning Issue, they are greeted as potential Heretics or Sinners who might need to be burned at the stake in order to preserve the purity of the Lefty movement.
The critics are not satisfied simply with the improvement of life for the world’s most poor and desperate; they also want to see those at the top taken down a notch. “Is it fair that you have so much influence?” the Gateses are asked. “No,” they answer, but they have too much tact to tell the questioners that “fairness” in itself is not the goal of philanthropy. They note, however, that this question implies another: “If we think it’s unfair that we have so much wealth, why don’t we give it all to the government?” And here they say that, unlike government, foundations can “take a long-term approach to solving problems, and manage high-risk projects that governments can’t take on and corporations won’t.”
Unaddressed is how it is more ‘fair’ for the government to have that money than the individual who earned it, whether or not you think that the earning was ‘fair’.
A good example is the question, “Does saving kids’ lives lead to overpopulation?” Is this a serious question? It appears that we are now at a point where a foundation has to justify its efforts to save the lives of suffering children. Though the Gateses respond that when children are more likely to survive into adulthood, parents have smaller families, they also note, “saving the lives of children is its own justification.”
Not, obviously, in the eyes of the person who asked that particular question. The problem with focusing on One Burning Issue is that it leads actors into extreme the-ends-justify-the-means thinking, and brings them to support methods from which, if just sprung on them cold, they would recoil in horror. (Think of some of the things being said about Trump, the only justification seeming to be that Trump Is Actually Hitler.)