If you thought billionaires were going to save us

Oh, come on. The latest article in The New York Times about the state of the Giving Pledge really is confusing the forecast for the weather.

The issue isn’t whether billionaires have decided to return to their impish poses, rubbing their nubby cocks as they amass countless fortunes doing, at this point, god knows what. The issue is that the industry is beholden to billionaires in the first place!

I’m so glad that MacKenzie Scott and the Arnolds have followed through on their commitment to give a profound amount of their amassed wealth away in real time. It would be really pissy of me to say that this money hasn’t done actual good in the past few years. But I don’t know if it’s great that we are dependent upon a divorcee who deeply hates her ex-husband and two libertarians who suddenly found themselves outflanked on the right.

A better question than “Is the Giving Pledge now cringe among the Epstein-adjacent” is “Is there a way we can reimagine society so that this industry is not dependent upon a handful of billionaires to give as they see fit, noblesse oblige on steroids, people with genuinely evil amounts of money–yes even the one billionaire you like, please be real–and instead capture that wealth the same way the rest of us schmucks have ours taken, through taxes without a million loopholes, as if any of us wanted to see our money fund wars and genocides instead of, I don’t know, roads and school lunches and eliminating the entire fucking concept of copays?”

Better yet: why have billionaires?