Back to #2234 - Marc Andreessen, with Marc Andreessen.
Why Was the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Attacked?
Marc Andreessen says the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was brutally attacked from the left because Mark Zuckerberg and his wife decided where the money would go instead of letting the government allocate it.
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife had a ton of money in Facebook stock and created a nonprofit called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The original mission was to literally cure all disease, and in his account the money could be like $200 billion. They committed to donate 99% of their assets to the new foundation. The attack said they were only doing it to save money on taxes. You do not give away 99% of your money in order to save money on taxes. The attack was vicious. The fundamental reason was how they dared treat the money as their own and decide where it goes. Tax rates for billionaires should go to 90 something percent, the government should take the money, and the government should allocate it as the morally proper thing to do.
The root is utopian collectivism, the core idea of socialism: radical egalitarianism in which everybody should be exactly the same, all outcomes should be exactly the same, and everything should be completely fair at all times. Some root of it is envy. Nietzsche's term resentment names envy, resentment, and bitterness so intense that it causes an inversion of values, so things that used to be good become bad. Philanthropy becomes bad because the state, operating on behalf of the people as a whole, should hand out the money, not the individual.