No. of Recommendations: 5
The Gates Foundation does some amazing work. Gates sees charity as a series of problems to be solved, like an engineer would. So he is taking on sanitation and diseases, and from what I've read, he is solving problems and improving lives.
In some ways, this is a bug, not a feature.
These charities/foundations will adopt their founders' ideas about what the public good is - which may not match up with what societies might determine for themselves, through little-d democratic processes, think the public good is.
Sometimes the choices they make are objectively terrible, from a public good perspective (say, donating huge sums to their Ivy League alma mater for a new building). But even if their charitable activities do contribute to the public good (developing a container for keeping medicines cold), those priorities aren't necessarily the ones that a broader cross-section of society would have chosen.
Again, this is their money - and if they want their money to reflect their vision for what would make the world better, they have every right to direct their charitable giving in that direction. But when tax policy ends up favoring/subsidizing those choices, it bleeds into public policy a bit more. Which is why revisiting the favorable tax treatment for these types of charitable donations is a possible solution to capturing unrealized gains.^^
Albaby
^^At least, in theory. In practice, the forces that would be arrayed against doing that would be so politically potent that it could never actually happen.
