In the season of gift-giving and year-end charitable contributions, you might appreciate John Stossel‘s latest column.
Private charity is unquestioningly better than government efforts to help people. Government squanders money. Charities sometime squander money, too, but they usually don’t.
Proof of the superiority of private over government efforts is everywhere. Catholic charities do a better job educating children than government — for much less money. New York City’s government left Central Park a dangerous mess. Then a private charity rescued it. But while charity is important, let’s not overlook something more important: Before we can help anyone, we first need something to give. Production precedes donation. Advocates of big government forget this.
We can’t give unless we (or someone) first creates. Yet wealth creators are encouraged to feel guilt. “Bill Gates, or any billionaire, for that matter,” Yaron Brook, author of “Free Market Revolution” and president of the Ayn Rand Institute, said on my TV show, “how did they become a billionaire? By creating a product or great service that benefits everybody. And we know it benefits us because we pay for it. We pay less than what it’s worth to us. That’s why we trade — we get more value than what we give up. So, our lives are better off. Bill Gates improved hundreds of millions of lives around the world. That’s how he became a billionaire.”
Gates walks in the footprints of earlier creators, like John D. Rockefeller, who got rich by lowering the price of oil products, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who did the same for transportation. The clueless media called them robber barons, but they were neither robbers nor barons.
They and other creators didn’t just give us products to improve our lives, they also employed people. That’s charity that keeps on giving, because employees keep working and keep supporting their families. “That’s not charity,” Brook said. “(It’s) another trade. You pay your employees and get something in return. But the employee is better off, and you are better off.
“And when you start thinking about the multiplier effect, $50 billion for Bill Gates? That’s nothing compared to the value he added to the world. That is much greater than the value he’ll ever add in any kind of charitable activity.” Gates now donates billions and applies his critical thinking skills to charity. He tested ideas in education, like small high schools, and dumped them when they didn’t work. Good. But if he reinvested his charity money in Microsoft, might he have helped more people? Maybe.
