Who Do You Trust More? Our Government? The Rich?

We have loads of challenges in this country including:

• Unemployment / low utilization of our work force
• Declining performance of our students, especially in math and science,
• An ancient immigration policy,
• Super pacs and lobbyists running our government,
• Government spending out of hand, see immediately above,
• A idiotic War on Drugs program,
• Discrimination against those that are different (not the majority)
• Wealth Inequality 

It is hard to find the silver lining in any of these challenges.  But, let's look at the last issue, "Wealth Inequality".   All bad.  Not really.  Look at this Ted Talk on the Gates Foundation. 

The two big contributors are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of the richest people in the world.  It is Bill and Melinda Gates goal to give away 95% of their wealth.  Warren Buffet has already given away 80% of his wealth to the Gates Foundation and with intentions of giving away more.  Warren said he trusts Bill and Melinda to manage the money as good or better than he could manage it.

The Gates Foundation is attacking world health and poverty, polio, education, and dozens of other problems.  Its spending on world health is the same order of magnitude as the United Nations.  It attacks issues like contraception (despite Melinda being a Catholic) that governments can not seem to act on because of religious politics. They try innovative education approaches since they are not bound by the assembly line approach to education that is the status quo in America.  

Do you know what Project Loon is?

Larry Page the owner of Google  has incredible aspirations to help the world.  Their goal is to make information available to everyone in the world.  Simple things like helping the farmer in arid Africa to predict the weather and know when to plant his crop each year or how to deal with an infestation of bugs.  Information that we take for granted.  Information that is reshaping the world.   He wants to bring the Internet to the entire world, see the incredible Lune Project.  He wants to put balloons in lower space orbiting the planet to beam down the internet to the entire world.  Yep, billions of dollars out of  Google's pockets; and yes he is serious.

And, look at Harry Stein, looking to double the output of corn per acre to help feed the world and reduce world hunger (plus make himself some money).  Look at George Mitchell philanthropist and the inventor of fracking.  Fracking will have more impact on job creation in America than all the government programs across this national put together.  How? Low cost natural gas is making America the place to start new industrial plants with good jobs and salaries requiring lots of supporting economic activity (separate blog coming soon).  Compare that to Europe that doesn't allow fracking for the most part and see how that has lead to economic bondage to Russia. 

And, of course, we need to mention Moore's Law, Apple, Google and the techies that are revolutionizing communications with the cell phone, tablets, and devices yet to be imagined.

The list goes on and on. So who got the ball moving.  Quoting from Gates Foundation:

  Gates is famous for asking other billionaires to commit to giving away half their fortunes, reportedly inspired by Melinda’s reading The Power of Half by Kevin Salwen and his 14-year old daughter Hannah in 2010, about selling their home, giving half the proceeds to charity, and buying one half the size for their family.  Bill and Melinda have committed to giving 95% of their fortune to charity over time; that is an astounding measure of generosity.

Now lets look at Lawrence Lessig pushing for Campaign Finance Reform via walks across America.    I don't know if he can pull it off, but Congress alone is not going to tackle this problem, they are too caught up with their number one job, raising money to get elected. 

It is not our inherently corrupt government that is effectively addressing our problems as a nation. Surprisingly, a lot of the problems are being attacked by the richest among us ... those that are the benefactors of the wealth inequality that exists in this country.  The Gates hope to persuade many rich people to give half of their wealth back to society to make a difference.  Warren Buffett was the first convert.  Hopefully more will follow, all starting from the example of Kevin Salwen and his 14 year-old daughter Hannah.

So, could historians look back and say this was the decade the U.S. government became completely ineffective and the rich people took over, mostly for good?