House of Eratosthenes

Bono, and Bill and Melinda Gates, have been named the Time Persons of the Year for 2005 by Time Magazine for their charitable work and efforts to reduce global poverty and improve health.

The magazine’s citation, which hits newsstands tomorrow, is reported by BBC News UK as:

For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow…

BBC’s webpage also had a revealing snippet on rock singer Bono, and just who exactly he is and what he’s been up to:

“Bono charmed and bullied and morally blackmailed the leaders of the world’s richest countries into forgiving $40bn in debt owed by the poorest,” the magazine said.

The three are doing a lot more, when you think about it, than simply “daring” the rest of us to follow. A whole LOT more. An older report on this effort from CNN covers some of the comments that Bill Gates had about his foundation, and its mission, and this made my eyeballs pop out a little:

Gates: ‘The need to engage’

Gates and his wife, Melinda, have created a $24 billion fund whose main purpose is to bridge the disparity in health care between poor and rich countries. Bono cited the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a source of funding for DATA.

Gates warned, however, that private charitable contributions alone will not be enough to achieve the DATA goals; governments also must play a part.

“Private philanthropy is no substitute for governmental action here,” Gates said. “The scale of the problem and the need to engage, government-to-government, is just way too great for this to be done, even with the kind of increase we’ll see in personal philanthropy. And we’ve said to governments, you know, ‘If you step up and increase, we’ll step up and increase as well,'” Gates said.

“If government is pulling back on this stuff, then the AIDS epidemic absolutely will not be stopped and the whole view of the rich world and how they’ve behaved to the world at large I think will be sort of irredeemable,” Gates said.

At that point the CNN reporter demanded to know “Mr. Gates, how do you know private charitable contributions will not be enough and governments must play a part, if your own contribution has been so substantial? Is this a mathematical reckoning, or a conceptual one?” Just kidding. The reporter did NOT ask that question, or if he did, it damn sure wasn’t part of the story I read. This is important. If it’s a mathematical determination, Mr. Gates — hey, you’re the man who gave us Excel! Can I see the sheets you drew up that convinced you of this?

I mean, whichever one it is, the answer would be central to the story wouldn’t it? If this is really all about helping the poor people?

There’s something terribly ironic about this. In the week leading up to Time’s announcement, Greg Evans’ comic strip Luann had a storyline involving that dork Brad DeGroot, his current infatuation, the sick love triangle involving the infatuation’s ex, and the stuffed toy animal drive taking place at Brad’s firehouse. The excellent work speaks for itself, and people of all political persuasions will immediately understand what’s happening here is “comical” because it’s anything but healthy.

People of all ideological stripes will also understand (have to concede?) that there is little conceptual difference between the Bono’s “morally blackmailing,” and the sweet thing’s troubling quip in the middle strip, “what have you done?” Forgive the debt, or I’ll make bad P.R. for you. Buy the toys, or I’ll go out with Dirk. It’s the same thing. Corporations don’t get “embarrassed,” they just make and lose money, trying like the dickens to do the former and not the latter. It’s what they do.

When Hurricane Katrina smashed New Orleans practically into oblivion, America responded by simply giving a high profile to the devastating events, and then working on making it easy for concerned people to do something to help the people who needed it. There was very little “shaming” or “moral blackmail” going on, and Mr. Gates, I recall no arbitrary judgments by our government about who had the bucks, who was giving them up, who was being a scrooge, etc. etc. etc. What you call “governmental action,” in that catastrophe, in my recollection led to very little except heartbreak, cynical comedy, and scandal. Meanwhile, the private donations that you say somehow aren’t going to be adequate, continued to quietly pour in. Our privately-supported institutions continued to quietly hand out dry blankets, medicine, and hot food. They solicited more funds from people like me, tastefully, quietly, and as the effects became worse, more frequently. We stepped up, and made a difference. Smashing success? I dunno. Most people would agree it wasn’t a boondoggle like FEMA with the little white debit cards.

Now, you know Africa probably better than I do, and having studied the situation you probably have a better idea of what’s needed. But you left out something important: Governments don’t have money, they take it away from people. It’s very rare that they actually fix problems such as this, and on the occasions when such problems are fixed, they damn sure don’t say “okay, the crises has abated, you can have your money back.”

And of all the people who can be deceived into thinking that’s possible, you should be among the very last.

The point is, not only is it unhealthy, but it’s exceedingly dangerous, to get this culture going where how much money you’ve got is everybody else’s business and they get to make moral pronouncements on how well you’re doing and whether you’re forgiving debts like you should.

What’s dangerous about it is, life is not static. (Ironically, Gates’ Microsoft is a company known for making software that works great as long as life is static, and does all kinds of goofy things, like locking up, taking several hours’ worth of work with it, once life becomes dynamic.) Who, this week, is in a position to help the poor and AIDS-infected in Africa? Who, this week, has done an inadequate job of forgiving the debt and forking over the bucks? Who, this week, is in the most desperate need of the money? And who, this week, possesses the incomprehensible power that comes with the authority of deciding these things?

Mr. Gates’ thinly-veiled pitch for socialism brings to mind a rarely-cited quote from Atlas Shrugged, which makes some of the points I’ve made, above, and raises a few others:

We’re all one big family, they told us, we’re all in this together. But you don’t all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day – together, and you don’t all get a bellyache – together. What’s whose ability and which of whose needs come first? When it’s all in one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht – and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth – why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability and have not collapsed? No? He can’t? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room?…Oh well…Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We *voted* on it. Yes ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars – rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family,’ and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ – so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because its miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm – so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that *his* need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

Extreme? Hey, I don’t know. I DON’T KNOW. That’s the whole point. The magazine isn’t out until tomorrow, but to date I haven’t read anything about any limits to what these governments are supposed to be doing to their people to raise the money being asked of them. I have no reason to believe there are to be any such limits. I have read no disclaimers such as Bill Gates or Bono saying “now, now, we aren’t going so far as to make all the world’s governments socialist.”

What would they have to gain from making such a disclaimer? They would have to gain a LOT, actually, and they would gain it on behalf of the people they are supposed to be trying to help. I’m accustomed to being in the minority, but here in America there are a lot of people like me. We give to charities, and find out later there is a link between the charity and the United Nations, and say to ourselves “Oh my God” and quietly wonder if we’ve done the right thing. We remember such things, and the next time we have a little bit of cash, we make sure it goes someplace that doesn’t bash capitalism. After all, without capitalism, we would have nothing to fork over, would we? And then a good chunk of the time, we get surprised again, and so we have to stay up-to-date about it. We don’t feel good about giving up money, until we’re satisfied the money actually went to something that addresses the problem. So we do our “consumer reports” research on these foundations while we write the checks. We do this very quietly, and there are a lot of people who have this concern.

The issue is public support for these foundations — regardless of whether the foundations are private or public — and how important that public support is. That public support is tied to how much money will be raised — or it ought to be important. By failing to provide the assurances that his foundation isn’t out to foster world socialism, while he’s saying some very socialist things, Mr. Gates is passing up an opportunity to ensure that support. At the same time, he’s advocating a relationship between his foundation and the world governments, that would make this public support less important. Think about it. The government tells you to do something, you do it. If you don’t, they’ll make you.

I haven’t read anything yet to assure me that world-socialism isn’t part of the mission — and I’ve read plenty enough to suggest that perhaps that is what it’s all about.

Even if it isn’t — hey, you guys are Persons of the Year. If a little of something is good, a lot of it must be better, right?

Ask Brad DeGroot.

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