With the recent news that Bill Gates will give up stewardship of Microsoft in the next two years to concentrate on his foundation work. And, the news that the second-richest man in the world will give his fortune to the richest man in the world, it is important to recall that things actually get done absent government involvement.
As Samuel Pepys once observed, “pretty to see what money will do.”
The Toronto Star reminds us that:
“In America, with its tradition of diminished reliance on government, private largesse accounts for the existence of the Johns Hopkins Hospital; the University of Chicago, Stanford University, New York University, Duke University, Wake Forest University and Vanderbilt University, among others; and even the Statue of Liberty. (France provided the statue, but it lay in dismantled pieces for a decade until New York tabloid publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who also founded America’s leading school of journalism at Columbia University and the journalism prizes named for him, kicked off a “children’s drive” of penny donations with an outsized donation of his own to build the massive podium on which the massive statue now rests.)
“The Chandler family [really the Otis family] of the Los Angeles Times, depicted harshly but accurately in Chinatown, created a viable economy in Southern California — now one of the largest economies in the world — by redirecting distant rivers to the fresh-water-starved region. Carnegie combated illiteracy by building about 1,100 libraries worldwide, some half-dozen of which are still in use by the Toronto Library System. Civic leaders in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the 1970s banded together — Target Corp., 3M Co., General Mills Inc. among them — to combat the growing scourge of slum neighbourhoods. John Hancock Financial Services Inc., before its recent acquisition by Toronto’s Manulife Financial Corp., saved a then doomed Boston Marathon.”
Given the choice of funds in the hands of the individuals who earned it or the federal government, it is an easy decision.
