Charity.

An excellent editorial by Alan Maass on Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's "Giving Pledge". Some excerpts:

WARREN BUFFETT ($40 billion in net worth, number 2 on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 2009) says it was an "easy sell" to get 40 billionaires to join him in the "Giving Pledge"--a commitment by the super-rich to give away at least half of their wealth to charitable causes.

The pledge is a project of Buffett and Bill Gates ($50 billion, number 1). It was unveiled to a select audience of the super-rich elite at a secret meeting held in May 2009 in the President's Room at Rockefeller University in New York City--where one of the participants, financier David Rockefeller Jr. ($2.2 billion, number 147), seems to have an in.

Buffett and Gates' case basically came down to this: Anyone rich enough to get an invitation had far more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetime--more probably than even their wildest children could burn through. So why not donate the portion not already earmarked for more mansions, private jets and diamond-encrusted SUVs--and glory in the grateful thanks of the less fortunate to boot?

The initiatives spearheaded by Gates and friends, described so often as altruistic, but more often than not shaped by their political prejudices and organized according to their cherished free-market principles--what authors Matthew Bishop and Michael Green call "philanthrocapitalism"--have come to the fore at exactly the same time that government programs aiding working people and the poor, protecting the environment and advancing social goals have been cut back.

These cuts have accelerated during the Great Recession, and their effects are devastating, as a recent New York Times article documented--public schools across Hawaii closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money; the public bus system shut down in Clayton County, Ga., outside Atlanta; one-third of the streetlights switched off in Colorado Springs.

It's no secret what set the stage for these cuts--decades of conservative political domination in Washington, under Republicans and Democrats, which, among other projects, whittled away at the corporate and individual tax system, progressively starving the government of revenue at the federal, state and local level.

The portion of federal tax revenue coming from corporate taxes has fallen to below 10 percent, down from about 33 percent half a century ago. The crowning achievement of the tax-cutters, though, was Bush's two massive tax-break giveaways, at a cost of $1.3 trillion, whose benefits were enjoyed primarily by the already rich. That kind of money dwarfs what Gates and friends are promising to donate.

The tax cuts were justified by a generation's worth of smears against "big government" programs, allegedly administered by unthinking bureaucrats and benefiting the undeserving.

And now, here come the philanthrocapitalists, whose mega-fortunes were made that much bigger by Washington's tax-break mania, promising to contribute a fraction of what they took away during the past 30 years, but only if they get to call all the shots, because they know so much better than anyone else what's best.

As journalist Peter Wilby wrote in the Guardian: "If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to stop lobbying against taxation and regulation; to avoid creating monopolies; to give their employees better wages, pensions, job protection and working conditions; to make goods and use production methods that don't kill or maim or damage the environment or make people ill."

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Also, here's a cute video for dimwits of Zizek rapping about charity.

This a longer version of the passage he quotes from Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely any one at all escapes.

Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand "under the shelter of the wall," as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life - educated men who live in the East End - coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.