Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 225 posts

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#171

Post by redblacktree »

merpnderp wrote: post #69
HiLo wrote: post #4

Krämer: So it's not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That's a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow? SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day. Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democrat…

You make it sound like Zuckerberg's donation in Newark happened in a vacuum. It happened in tight collaboration with the school system, who stated needs and approved every step of the process. It's not like Zuckerberg stepped in and said "you shall obey!!!" Course in this case it just turned out that not only could the democratically elected government of Newark magically waste all their tax revenue, they were excell…

You claim this donation was made in "tight collaboration with the school system," yet, CNBC and The New Yorker say that "One of the criticisms of Newark's school reform has been the lack of input from the community." [0]

These seem to be opposite view points. Do you have a source for that claim? Or perhaps you were saying something else?

[0]: http://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/23/where-zuckerbergs-100-million...

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#172

Post by dragonwriter »

merpnderp wrote: post #145
HiLo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm sure GWB staffed his cabinet with "experts." Yes.

Well Obama has had 6 years to fix it. Which makes this less of a republican/democrat issue than a "why the hell aren't we copying Finland" issue. You know like why would government spend all this money on contractors and consultants to figure out a new way to do things when they could just copy a highly functional and successful system? Oh, corruption. Right.

> Well Obama has had 6 years to fix it.

In the world where Obama was a dictator and could unilaterally rewrites statutes, sure.

In the real world, Obama had just under two years (because Congressional terms start earlier than Presidential terms) with Democratic majorities in Congress.

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#173

Post by sageikosa »

Retra wrote: post #152
shaftoe wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And without the production of the individuals and businesses that exist in a society, the state would have no ability to skim off the top and spend that money. I believe that the state (which isn't "society", it is the governing body of a region of land), has no right to a share of anything that is not voluntarily granted or contractually agreed upon. Believing in a higher entity with more rights than any individual…

The worst argument in the world: http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html "Feudalism is bad, so anything that can be vaguely compared to it must also be bad."

Well, depending on whether you consider the fief or the fealty pledge as the defining characteristic of feudalism, it's not a bad analogy. I get more annoyed when people conflate manorialism with feudalism. One is how the people survive, the other is how the lords of the manor (or city) are beholden to a higher power.

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#174

Post by sageikosa »

dibujante wrote: post #155
shaftoe wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And without the production of the individuals and businesses that exist in a society, the state would have no ability to skim off the top and spend that money. I believe that the state (which isn't "society", it is the governing body of a region of land), has no right to a share of anything that is not voluntarily granted or contractually agreed upon. Believing in a higher entity with more rights than any individual…

Feudalism, noun: A political and economic system of Europe from the 9th to about the 15th century, based on the holding of all land in fief or fee and the resulting relation of lord to vassal and characterized by homage, legal and military service of tenants, and forfeiture. The state has a right to a fixed share of its subjects' income due to the contractually agreed-upon system of taxation. This is what that whole…

I don't think representative government was the issue, I think it was the nature of the state's power and influence. It is possible to have a majority opinion that is wrong, and a majority decided policy that is unjust. Surely arguing against the majority that has a policy of punishing dissent is a bad thing if you want to survive, but fortunately the majority still sort of values civil discourse, so we can talk like people solving problems instead of being partisans.

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#175

Post by JoshTriplett »

thomnottom wrote: post #114
JoshTriplett wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He said that having a few very wealthy people decide what were the most important causes was bad compared to having the democratically elected government decide. You may disagree with that, but it is quite different from simply saying public good and private bad. How is that any different from the comment you're replying to? If the government is running something, it's a government ("public") program rather than a…

Because neither the article nor the German billionaire (sorry, I really should go back and get his name instead of referencing the title, but I'm being lazy) are saying that private foundations are inherently bad - which is what the comment I replied to stated. What he says is bad is shifting the decision to the wealthy instead of the public.

That's still the same thing; if the public is deciding where the funding is going then it isn't a private foundation anymore.

Now, if the public is deciding by choosing where to put their own funding, in the form of donations, that makes more sense. But in that sense, the millionaires and billionaires creating or donating to charitable foundations are doing the same thing: deciding where to put their own funding.

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#176

Post by dragonwriter »

jaggederest wrote: post #111
applecore wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument makes no sense: the people control everything in a democracy, literally, by voting for their representation in government.

How well does that representation actually fulfill the wishes of their constituency as a whole, let alone any individual voter? That's the point - by being representative with no accountability, there's only the binary ability to hire or fire with no ability to manage.

> How well does that representation actually fulfill the wishes of their constituency as a whole, let alone any individual voter?

Varies considerably between things which get lumped together as representative democracies, from very poorly in systems like the US's which feature a strong duopoly, to very well in many modern multiparty systems. (More detail in, among other places, Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.)

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#177

Post by exelius »

IMO both have their merits.

Governments are good at solving broad, societal level problems. If they weren't, they would be overthrown and replaced. But they're remarkably inefficient at solving individual, specific problems: they can do it, but it will take 4x as long and cost 10x as much as it should. Also, government intervention is limited in scope - it's hard to be philanthropic outside your constituency.

That's where philanthropists can step in. There are some problems that don't provide enough benefit to any single government to throw weight behind solving, but that require massive resources. Bill Gates' anti-malaria campaign is a good example: no country with the money to fund a malaria eradication program has significant rates of malaria.

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#178

Post by Retra »

slavik81 wrote: post #167
Retra wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You trust the guy? Well, I don't. How about we vote on it.

Federal elections occur every two years. You've already voted on it.

The granularity of that vote was quite insignificant next to the scope of this issue, don't you think?

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#179

Post by ancap »

HiLo wrote: post #22
lloyddobbler wrote: post #15

> I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That's unacceptable. Or flip that around - is Krämer's implied solution not a case of the state taking the place of the individual? Put another way, if you founded a company, created thousands…

Because the structure that enabled you to amass that amount of wealth is flawed, and disproportionately rewards "you" over the network that actually did much of the heavy lifting. Nobody is saying they shouldn't be richly rewarded, just that it's gotten fucking ridiculous.

Flawed how? Who was shorted? Everyone involved in the system worked and earned the agreed upon amount.

>disproportionately rewards "you" over the network that actually did much of the heavy lifting

You seem to advocate the labor theory of value which is a demonstrably false theory.

Re: Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

#180

Post by pan69 »

applecore wrote: post #93
Afforess wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He said that having a few very wealthy people decide what were the most important causes was bad compared to having the democratically elected government decide. This sentence is really amusing to me, because our democratically elected government, at least at the congressional level, is nearly all wealthy millionaires. So either way, important causes are decided by the wealthy.

Your argument makes no sense: the people control everything in a democracy, literally, by voting for their representation in government.

That just sounds very naive. In theory you're right, but in theory Karl Marx's communism sounds pretty good as well.

They way you describe it is not how it works in the real world, unfortunately.

Post reply on HN