Yes, The Gates Foundation has the best PR out of any charity right now. I'm sure many would have said the same about Red Cross about 20 years ago. But let me ask you this - with Bill Gates' charity giving away billions of dollars constantly, how does he continue to make more and more money every single year? That's a hint that being charitable isn't really doing the same thing for him as it does for you and me. For example, if you look up where he's sending it, do you think he's putting it all directly in the hands of those who need it? Because the charity has also donated billions to other companies, and hundreds of millions to those they have stocks and bonds in. That's tons of money that could have gone into public infrastructure but is essentially being reinvested through the charity. I'm not saying *none* of the money has helped anyone, that would be particularly egregious. What I'm really saying is that with the laws we have in place, charity on a scale like this stops being "charity" as we know it. If a billionaire was truly charitable they would stop being a billionaire, simple as that.

The Gates foundation is a tough one which is why I’m happy to dig in. The Gates foundation in more than one instance has taken public money from counties to create limited research which supports the dismantling of public education in support of charter schools or less efficacious alternatives. This is a big deal. Often county or public money from locally partisan communities is responsible for funding these projects and the research has been repeatedly called into question. The foundation has tremendous PR though with Gates at the helm talking about philanthropic utilitarianism while avoiding talking about our variant of capitalism.

Taking on the comments further below. Charities categorically are catastrophic at dealing with social problems. It’s important to note I didn’t say individually but categorically, non-government organizations and non-profits can be added to the above statement in degrees. IE looking at Christian charities as an easy example but personally many charities in general can be problematic. It’s even more problematic with Publix or McDonalds when they became corporate tax write offs asking for public donations. They do not supplant social programs.

Further: Part of the problem of diffusing charity by 100 entities vs 1 is that much of the wealth no matter how large in magnitude is spent on overhead and that wealth is not necessarily easily regeneratable. Look at the Red Cross as an example of overhead and effective out reach. Many charities are not this effective.

3rdly, the idea that charities or independent organizations are better at independently managing societal problems from an ecological standpoint than say the government is an ideological position and is a wrongful assumption.

The government is evidently better, by virtue of so many effective social programs throughout the world, even for business development. Even social programs decried such as the the UK National Health Service don’t compare to the millions of Americans without access to healthcare; even with insurance and agreements between companies it’s unbelievably difficult to get the treatment appropriately paid for for many people.

And this is true even for charities, the scope of their social outreach is inherently incapable of solving the problems they address in society. Charities are a form of prevarication from the many and destitution for all.

>it's not really Gates' money anymore, and there are rules regarding what he can do with it.

It's 100% still his money. He controls what is done with it.

most of the billionaires, the ones we are "praising" for charity who are simultaneously against systemic change, DO in fact own their organizations. Let's bring this back to the original point - are charity and systemic changed opposed? What I'm saying is charity is not opposed to systemic change in an example like yours here, where they theoretically don't own the organization, but in many cases they APPEAR opposed, because of the phony definition of "charity" that these billionaires who own their charities use. When someone that rich uses their own charity to get richer, which indeed happens with at least a few of them, then that's where this appearance of opposition between charity and systemic change appears, an opposition that is ultimately faulty because it's not real charity being pitted against here. I'm sure that there are plenty of rich people who both donate to charity AND believe in systemic change to a significant degree (probably not billionaires because it usually takes a special level of greed to become and stay a billionaire, since the realistic needs of money in any given person's life are never that high). I'm not arguing that a rich person donating to charity and losing money can't exist, or that someone can't do that and also be for systemic change. I'm simply saying that when that joke of a system we also call "charity" because of the mask it puts up, the one fueled by billionaires, when that system is used by someone, then indeed there becomes an opposition between this and the idea of radical change, because like I already stated they're operating in "a whole other world" than us, and what they're doing is not charity.