Democrats want us to believe that there is some cohort of “good billionaires” who can be relied upon to fight for political progress. But as the right-wing turn of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk suggests, this is nonsense.
could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
I’m not entirely disagreeing with you on your point, I just want to add that we have a system of cronyism. The taxpayers of a country (more specifically, the US) spend, say, $60 billion to feed an underdeveloped African country or area. The trick is, the politicians have made sure that the money goes to specific contractors. Who have no investment in using the money to solve the problem. Their business model is now not to fix something, it’s to make sure the program stays funded so they can keep getting $60b to do $3b worth of work with $2b worth of materials and make a profit and donate to more political campaigns to keep doing this on a greater scale. That $60b directly applied with government labor and government supervision would have worked. But cronyism prevented it at every step.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
It’s just not that simple.
I’m not entirely disagreeing with you on your point, I just want to add that we have a system of cronyism. The taxpayers of a country (more specifically, the US) spend, say, $60 billion to feed an underdeveloped African country or area. The trick is, the politicians have made sure that the money goes to specific contractors. Who have no investment in using the money to solve the problem. Their business model is now not to fix something, it’s to make sure the program stays funded so they can keep getting $60b to do $3b worth of work with $2b worth of materials and make a profit and donate to more political campaigns to keep doing this on a greater scale. That $60b directly applied with government labor and government supervision would have worked. But cronyism prevented it at every step.