Eric S Burdon
1 min readMay 11, 2023

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Patagonia's founder, Yvon Chouinard, donated the entire company to a non-profit to fight climate change. On the surface, it sounds nice until you realize that his children still own the company and that the donation was to avoid $700 million in taxes.

They do give away money, but it's often small fractions of their wealth. What they donate is money they could recover easily. Jeff Bezos has donated nearly $3 billion to charity which is nice, but it's overshadowed by the fact he's worth nearly 130 billion.

You do have a point that no one has the right to judge what is too much, but we also have no right to say billionaires are benevolent or that they are trying to solve particular issues. They are actively hurting the planet and some of their more charitable moves are slight in the light of how much money they've made and what they accomplished.

I also haven't been to a government housing project as I'm not American. But considering what I know about America, I can imagine it's not a robust system and needs a lot of work but is being neglected by the multi-millionaires in Congress who are bought out by even richer corporations.

I agree with the capitalist study you described, but the question is more of how much money is received in return. The model itself is not that bad, but it's twisted when people are asking for more rent when they really don't need the extra money.

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Eric S Burdon
Eric S Burdon

Written by Eric S Burdon

I write (and sometimes do videos) about self-help for those who don't like self-help. Complete with the occasional memes and riffs on the industry that I love.

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