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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (57350)	7/23/1999 10:11:00 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

I swear I had not read the editorial below when I posted the comment above but, my God does it ever back up my contention: interactive.wsj.com WSJ: Mr. Gates Giveth Seems that Bill Gates can't even give it away. For most of the 1990s, of course, Mr. Gates has been tied up with a Justice Department that believes it knows the computer market better than any of its players. Ralph Nader accuses the Microsoft CEO of thinking he is "immune to public scrutiny." Now comes a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins who suggests that even the money Mr. Gates is donating to charity really doesn't fully belong to him. In his opinion piece in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Daniel S. Greenberg, author of "The Politics of Pure Science," puts it this way: "Although Bill Gates and his fellow foundation builders merit gratitude for their generosity, the fact is that much of their donated wealth would end up in public treasuries if the tax laws didn't permit its diversion for privately controlled philanthropic purposes. That makes a strong argument for transparency in foundations' operations: The public has a right to know how, why, by whom, and with what effect the money that might have belonged to it is being spent." This is indeed a novel argument, one that George III might have envied. The complaint is not that Mr. Gates, Microsoft or the William H. Gates Foundation has broken any law. It is simply that the public (read: government) has a stake in the foundation's operations simply because had the tax laws been otherwise the money might have flowed into the Internal Revenue Service's coffers. Taken to its logical conclusion, of course, this means that the government has a strong prior claim on all our money--and thus a stake in how we spend it. That doesn't strike us as an argument bound to be persuasive outside Richard Gephardt's office. It's a pity, because there is much to Mr. Greenberg's larger point, to wit, that foundations often operate without much scrutiny, in ways that their founders never anticipated and with an overwhelming assumption of goodwill enjoyed by neither of the counterparts in government or business. In other words, managements of foundations are as likely to pursue their own interests as they are anything else, and when they have lots of money to throw into a contest they might alter the contest itself. This, of course, is precisely what the founders of the American system meant by a free society, and they would have seen in Microsoft's huge assets a powerful hedge against the kind of arbitrary legal action we have seen in, say, the numerous antitrust actions filed against Microsoft itself. At the end of the day, the problem of foundation management is philosophically no different from the general problem of accountability in any business organization. From the outside, a free press and a citizenry free to organize and publicize are powerful counterweights to any abuse of power. From the inside, history demonstrates all too clearly that there is simply no substitute for a donor who insists on as much control over his foundation as he does over his company. Indeed, we recall Henry Ford II's resignation from the Ford Foundation in 1977, on the grounds that its trustees and staff had insufficient respect for "the [capitalist] system that makes the foundation possible." All this, however, is argument less for public than private accountability. Now at more than $10 billion, the William H. Gates foundation has become the fourth largest in the country, testament to its founder's business acuity, a booming stock market and a system that vests the power to determine winners and losers in the hands of consumers. Many of us, of course, will be keenly interested in which charities and projects Mr. Gates favors with his billions, and we are free to attack, cheer or publicize as we see fit. But let's not give the government any more bad ideas about whose money Mr. Gates is spending.