Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Why doesn’t Bill Gates (and the rest of us) donate money to the government?
Why doesn’t Bill Gates (and the rest of us) donate money to the government?
Mar 16, 2025 12:25 AM

When asked in a Reddit forum how much he should personally pay in taxes, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said he’s paid about $10 billion in taxes but that he should have paid more on his capital gains.

Gates also said, “As far as I know most billionaires (and other ply with tax laws.” This is certainly true in America. Most of our citizens seem to follow Jesus’s admonition to “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:17). But why don’t more people—including Gates—voluntarily pay more taxes?

I believe Gates is an honest man, but I don’t think he is pletely genuine about thinking he needs to pay more taxes. If he does, then the solution would be for him to give to the Federal government the money he thinks he should have paid. But he doesn’t do that. Why not?

The likely reasonis that Gates recognizes his money can be better used in other ways. Gates is the second most generous philanthropist in the U.S. (his BFF, Warren Buffett, is the first). As co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation he has given billions to fund such projects as ending extreme poverty and promoting global health. If he thought the U.S. government could—and would—spend his money more effectively, he’d have voluntarily paid more in taxes.

The reason Gates—and the rest of us—don’t consider thegovernmentour main choice for charitable giving is, as Matt Zwolinski once wrote, because we arerationally prudent:

[M]ost people know that there are better and more efficient ways of using their money to help other people than giving it to government. Even Warren Buffett knows this. Otherwise why didn’t he make that $37 billion dollar check out to the US Treasury?

We’re careful about how we spend our own money. Not just when we spend it on ourselves, but when we spend it on others too. Whether it’s consumption or charity, we want to get the most for our money. We’re understandably less cautious when es to spending other people’s money, but just because something is understandable doesn’t make it right. If we wouldn’t (and don’t) give our own money voluntarily to government, doesn’t this tell us something about whether we should try to force other people to give more of theirs under threat of legal penalty?

Featured image: “File:Microsoft Bill Gates (2472910099).jpg”byMasaru Kamikura from Japanis licensed underCC BY 2.0

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Follies of the Wise
Here’s a link to the introduction to Frederick Crews’ new book, Follies of the Wise, which includes the following statement: Having made a large intellectual misstep in younger days, I am aware that rationality isn’t an endowment but an achievement that e undone at any moment. And that is just why it is prudent, in my opinion, to distrust sacrosanct authorities, whether academic or psychiatric or ecclesiastic, and to put one’s faith instead in objective procedures that can place a...
A different view of immigration
I haven’t been uncritical of American bishops’ statements concerning immigration. But I wouldn’t go *quite* as far as Pastor Ralph Ovadal of Pilgrims Covenant Church, for whom the terms ‘antichrist,’ ‘Romanist,’ and ‘Reconquista’ fairly roll off the tongue. Rick Garnett has an appropriately tongue-in-cheek treatment at Mirror of Justice. ...
Why I am a classical liberal
Social and political theory is widely and, quite often, grossly misunderstood. What we call conservatism today, at least in several very important ways, was once called federalism, or classical liberalism. A central idea of this federalism was that the state should be built from below, not from above. Numerous orthodox Christian thinkers, both Catholic and Protestant, have explained and defended classical liberalism over the course of the past two or three centuries. It is in this sense that Pope Benedict...
History and empire
John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, writes up a summary of the proceedings of The Historical Society’s conference, “Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective.” “We urgently need an antidote to the journalistic clichés and the even more deplorable pseudo-scholarly discourse surrounding the interlocked themes of globalization, empire, and imperialism. We need the distance—the perspective—that good historical thinking affords. There was plenty of that on display in Chapel Hill, along with some muddle,” reports Wilson. For more on how...
Guilt free ecology
TerraPass is a way to assuage a guilty conscience caused by your car’s CO2 emissions. In the interest of trying to be balanced on the whole CO2 debate, here’s a link to their climate change blog with plenty of GW posts. To each his own. But it sounds like a way for mon folk to buy into what Iain Murray calls “the new aristocracy:” Al Gore justifies his enjoyment of a carbon-intensive lifestyle in a speech in the UK: He...
The new urban Christians
“Should I not be concerned about that great city?” asks God of the prophet Jonah about Nineveh, which “has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well.” God is rebuking the recalcitrant prophet, who only carried out his assigned proclamation in Nineveh after a rather harrowing adventure on the high seas. After Jonah delivered his message, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned,” the Bible...
Good news on immigration
Yes, I realize that no one likes the current version of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill. But it is possible to make constructive changes without prehensive. Here are a couple of recent examples: 1. Assimilation needs to be a priority. The Administration just formed a Task Force on New Americans to help legal immigrants e more fully Americanized. Whether the Task Force will do anything substantial remains to be seen. But it is encouraging that someone in the Administration understands...
Evangelicals and cable TV
A story over the weekend in Washington Post gives a good overview of the mixed motives behind evangelical campaigning for and against a la carte pricing of cable channels, despite the poorly chosen title, “Evangelicals vs. Christian Cable” (as if Christian broadcasters aren’t largely evangelicals of some sort or another). Just a sign that in the MSM evangelical is ing a term with primarily political rather than theological content. On the one side, lobbyists who want to be able to...
Religion & Liberty: exploring poverty and hunger
The Spring 2006 issue of Religion & Liberty is now available. The new issue focuses on the topics of hunger and poverty, especially in the developing world. As R&L explores the various aspects of poverty, it touches on issues ranging from the effectiveness of government programs to the benefits of bio-technology and from the implications of globalization to the need for a moral foundation behind the development of economics. Our feature interview is with Tony Hall; former Democratic congressman from...
There are more environmentalist misanthropes than you think
On April 3, I reported the story of Texas scientist Eric Pianka, who allegedly argued in a speech that the only hope for the planet was for a mutated Ebola virus to exterminate 90% of the human population. Forrest Mims, who attended the speech, broke the story. Over the next few weeks, there was a media firestorm over the incident, and Mims was accused of misrepresenting Pianka’s speech. As a result, I received several emails telling me that I should...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved