Comment by __turbobrew__
5 hours ago
How is it out of touch? I donated much more than Hashimoto did relative to our net worths, but I cannot deny that I would have felt much more satisfied making a 1000x impact if I was a billionaire.
I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
> How is it out of touch? I donated much more than Hashimoto did relative to our net worths, but I cannot deny that I would have felt much more satisfied making a 1000x impact if I was a billionaire.
You have no way of possibly knowing this. And I bet you its not true.
I'm no longer a billionaire, partially because I paid an astronomical amount in taxes (I don't play the tax avoidance games). And partially because we're donating a whole lot more than $400K per year. This is ONE donation. We don't publicize most of our giving because it attracts armchair critics like you, and its distracting from the goals.
(I make an exception for Zig and technical things because my influence for better and worse usually is net positive for the initiative)
But, more importantly, I don't think playing these "my donation is worth more than yours" games is productive. If you want to think that way thats fine, I won't defend myself or my family any further than this post.
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The problem is that when government spends $1,000,000 on your halfway house, it provides instant relief. It creates beds. The next year the government does it, the number of employees has doubled and it creates 20% more beds instead of the original amount. The third year it creates no beds and we find that 10% of the beds are gone, and the number of employees is now 1000. The government didn't care how well the money was invested.
Now if you invest $6000 and no one else was doing it, they would probably have created some percentage of 1 bed out of it. And if 18 other people invest $100 each maybe that's enough to complete the bed for a year. And if those altogether 19 people hear that the money went to good use, they donate again and they tell their friends. Maybe the halfway house in 10 years starts earning $25k per year and they keep costs low and the beds start increasing, they rent more space.
The government forced funding breaks it and turns it into a fake jobs program, the community funding it actually makes the service accountable.
This is just bad government, not government.
Public spending on things that require (a) maintainance (as almost all things do) (b) are massively less functional if the investment is not sustained (as many things are) is inherently going to lead to suboptimal results. It's equally bad if private entities do this, but for one reason or another, people seem to bitch about this less, because, well "freedom" etc.
Public spending (private too!) is also bad if it creates unnecessary bureaucracies and unnecessary obstacles. This can be tricky because defining "unnecessary" requires a set of values and these may not be universally accepted.
So, if you have a government program that behaves as in your hypothetical example, then the problem is inefficiency, corruption and waste, not government.
We still don't have a working model of a government doing a good job in the real world when it comes to carte blanch giving groups money. It does work really well when it's on the private side. The crux of the issue is that I pay too much in Taxes for 30% of it to be spent on downright fraud. Whether that is daycare scams, military spending scams, hospice scams, etc...
Since about 30% of my lifetime pay goes to taxes, and I am estimated over my entire life to make about $7m in salary. $1M of that is taxed, so potentially 300k of money is going to SCAMS.
Think about it, what if the government just decided tomorrow to give back all this money. I could finally afford to buy a house! But instead of me being able to buy a house, let's put another million bucks in a suitcase to fly to Mogadishu.
Hashimoto did more valuable work than you and then he is in position to do more impact wherever he pleases.
>>I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
We need some mechanism to select people who makes the choice. Popularity/lying contest (politics) ain't it. People making money conducting honest business is the best mechanism we have.
Why would I believe for one moment that someone who is successful at selling widgets should be deciding what resources to allocate to a homeless shelter?
I for one am glad that "let's just all follow bluecalm's hackernews comments" isn't how we select people who make "the choice".