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The Charity Industrial Complex

Easy Money Begats Easy Billionaires, who build Easy Foundations, which are easily captured. And before you know it, the apolitical becomes political, and the political becomes a lobbying machine. Big Money becomes Huge Money and Huge Money wields power.

And a perfectly good civilization goes to waste.

h/t Scott of the Pacific

How Charity Foundations Damage Western Societies

by John Smoke, im1776

Monument, Tomb, Ruins, Stone.

by Freestocks-photos

Charities are as large as the entire University sector.

Charitable foundations, and the specific charities they fund, are the single most important force in modern Western societies. They complete a triumvirate of the “journalism plus academia” shorthand of the Cathedral as Curtis Yarvin sees it. The amount of money sloshing around these organisations is simply mind-boggling. The latter is hard to reliably quantify, but in the UK, the charity ‘industry’ apparently registered £45 billion in revenues in 2021 alone. Compare this to the £40.5 billion total income in the UK higher education sector a couple of years ago and you get the idea.

John Smoke adroitly connects the dots and draws the spiral vortex that draws most charities in.

It starts so gently:

Imagine a billionaire. He’s an apolitical man. The driving purpose of his life has been to create goods and services for consumers and to provide shareholder value. He’s seventy years old, and suddenly realising he won’t be around forever starts thinking about his legacy. He consults his younger wife. She is also apolitical. After a few days or so of consulting each other they decide to find a way to donate 800 million to charity. They set to go and speak to their wealth advisors, to consult on where to go from here.

Medieval statue, civilization, city, charity, power.

by hansLinde

Gradually the mildly left leaning middle managers attract the moderately left, who employ the passionate left. Each round of funding attracts the harder-hard-liners, and gradually reaches more edgy projects. What starts off as “child poverty” becomes a plan to “counter digital hate”. Before long it’s a communist enclave pulling on the levers of power, armed with lawyer-sharks, millions of dollars, and professional fund managers to leverage the long term advantages of a large fund. It’s legal, but crazy.

Then there is way these machines may be handed to the spouses of said Billionaire after they expire or divorce. And thus some people driving national policy are not accountable to the voters, or the shareholders, but only to their own whims, or the whims of those who manipulate them.

Universities set the culture, but the Charity Machine makes it real

Charities are the main intermediary unit between academia and journalism. They can imbibe whatever is coming out of universities, turn the issues in question into campaigns, and then use those campaigns to secure coverage in media outlets. This all serves to exert pressure on liberal-democratic legislatures, getting them to copy-paste the charity’s findings into legislation which lawmakers can rubber-stamp.

The Charity industrial complex can go on indefinitely, long beyond their creator:

Unless we collectively do something to stop them, these charitable foundations are set to go on indefinitely too. Assuming their investments are managed prudently (most hire professional investment managers), there is no reason for them not to continue splurging billions for years to come. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust was founded in 1904 by a Quaker pacifist. By the 1970s it was funding Communists in Mozambique. It’s now one of the biggest charitable foundations in the UK, funding racial demagogues and cybertron armies alike.

Same goes for the Ford Foundation, set up of course by Henry Ford, who at least judging by the international grants it made in 2021 ($656 million worth), has also gone Communist. When George Soros dies, do people really expect his influence to suddenly stop? It won’t. It will be continued by the same machine that is currently in place, and probably going even crazier and more unhinged once the old man kicks it.

While personalising attacks on oligarchs such as Soros can be useful, what we are dealing with here is a structural problem.

This excellent essay does not describe the evil spawned by easy money from corrupt currencies based on thin air and IOUs  — but the power of the billionaire flows downstream from that.

While some billionaires are gifted and wise, the Easy Billionaires who grew rich through predatory capitalism and monopolistic control might not be the kind of people we want running the country.

Nor their wives.

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