Please, PLEASE look back in anger

Good day, and apologies for the long time between blog posts. You know how it is, I’m sure.

I recently suffered the pleasure of reading this on kiwiblog.co.nz, and knew immediately what my next post would concern:

Another of those filthy rich people has declared they are given most of their millions or billions to charity. This one is Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary and former head of Goldman Sachs.

I have no doubt in my mind that a billion dollars to a private charity has a far far greater beneficial effect on society than a billion dollars more spending by the Government. Hell even the tiny NZ Government can increase health spending by a billion dollars and not show any extra results for the money.

Think what the Red Cross would do with a billion dollars extra, as opposed to the Government.

Private donations are excellent way to temporarily remedy existing societal inequalities and, in effect, pacify the natives. They can, without delay, get much-needed food, water, and various other necessities to the people who need them most. A person who gives thusly is to be admired.

However, someone who should be more admired is he (or she, it goes without saying) who uses their fortune and influence not to immediately benefit the poor, but to work towards destroying the system that keeps them in poverty. This produces a much greater effect than any temporary appeasement and gratification possibly can.

Have you heard the expression “tough love”? I would rather no donations were given at all. I would not enforce this wish of mine, because that would be authoritarian, but I wish it nonetheless. I wish every poor person was made to suffer the slings and arrows of discontentment to the fullest. I wish the differences between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, to be visibly horrendous. I want there to be no possible reconciliation between they who buy holiday houses on golden beaches, and they who wearily subsist next to motorways in urban jungles with little ambition and littler hope (both having been progressively stolen from them by a system designed to preserve a social hierarchy in which they are the denizens of the lowest rung).

Only when the gulf – not merely “gap,” for this implies some small distance, easily crossed – the gulf between those who own and those who produce is fully visible to the most vapid observer, only then can there be change. I advocate not for bloody rebellion, not for death and the guillotine, but democratic change, wanted by the people, fully understood by the people. In a proper society, in a healthy democracy, there would be no need for charity, because there would be no poverty.

If the Red Cross had a billion dollars, they would certainly spend it on clean water and medicine, food and perhaps schools and housing. If they had the unrecalcitrant support of the OECD, they would kick the World Bank and the US out of Africa, set up protected marketplaces for local goods (the sort of protected marketplaces every developed country, including New Zealand, has in the past used to grow and prosper) and initiate a strong and lasting programme of infrastructural growth and reinforcement.

In the most simplified of terms, it is the difference between giving a man a fish, and teaching him how to fish. Or at least giving him the chance to catch something in an ocean not already trawled by multinational fishing fleets.