Credit: AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File
The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
This past February, the Daily Princetonian printed an opinion article written by columnist Braden Flax which assessed the $10 billion donation Jeff Bezos recently donated to fight climate change. Flax was left unsatisfied. His argument to reach this conclusion contains serious issues and deserved to be addressed separately.
First, Flax issues an unfair standard on Bezos. He writes that Bezos’ $10 billion donation is a drop in the bucket compared to his total wealth. It’s not. It’s around one tenth of the bucket. That’s not to mention that it’s Bezos’ bucket to begin with, that he built and filled himself.
Contrary to Flax’s claim that Bezos is an “elite” and “aristocrat,” Bezos did not begin his life as a billionaire, nor even a millionaire. It’s a familiar story to many of us, but apparently needs mentioning; Bezos came from humble beginnings before graduated Princeton summa cum laude with a 4.2 GPA. Through hard work and grit, he went on to become the richest man in the world.
Putting this issue aside for a moment, Flax’s argument does not appreciate the magnitude of Bezos’s donation. For one, if Bezos donated nearly all of his wealth, he could still be left with enough to make him a multimillionaire. Would that even appease critics like Flax?
If Jeff Bezos is an “egotistical man-child”, which is something I am certainly not affirming, then when the man-child donates ten billion dollars to fight climate change, you heap praise on the egotistical man-child so that he continues to do so. To do otherwise would be to insist on chopping off one of your hands before playing three-dimensional chess with a child who simply wants to eat his chocolate bar.
During Flax’s onslaught against the billionaire class he doesn’t once mention the billionaires Bezos is clearly attempting to emulate: Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Gates has championed nuclear energy both at home, and abroad in countries like China. He has fostered environmental sustainability and global friendliness and cooperation.
Gates, whose charity ranges as far out as sanitation issues in developing countries, has used the very same capitalism Flax despises to create an competitive charitable community. He fostered the solutions that every expert on the planet had told him were impossible: self-sustaining toilets that create their own energy, while also creating sanitary drinking water for local inhabitants.
If that’s not enough, Gates has gifted vaccinations to Africa in such proportions that polio in Africa has nearly been eradicated. But for Flax, Gates, Bezos, and their recipients should be group together and shamed.
I can only suspect why Flax would reach such a conclusion. It seems that he does not truly desire at least one of the outcomes he claims to believe in. Flax has no strong grounding to oppose one of the largest philanthropic donations in history simply on the basis that it sourced from a billionaire.
And therein lies the problem. In Flax’s argument, the health of the environment and the animals are only secondary problems. Flax is primarily concerned with capitalism and the existence of billionaires. If he had any other motive, he would not have reached his conclusion. Instead of praising the donation and criticizing capitalism, Flax criticized both.
Flax nearly directly states this in his article. He sees Bezos wealth as a greater threat to mankind than climate change. He does not think the fruits of Bezos’ donation are worth it.
And so, let us turn away from the concerns of the environment, just as Flax has done, and address the real issue presented in the article: capitalism and wealth.
The article’s argument that Bezos ought to feel personal hardship is coupled with odd references towards something much larger. In the piece, we are warned of a future that is determined by the “dictates of one man” and that we should seek a morally just society where “one man’s claim is credible to no one.”
Furthermore, there are other signals that things might be better if “resources were properly redistributed” and that “collective crisis requires collective solutions.” Combine this with the abundance of more blatant attacks on capitalism, and it is a clear dog whistle. In fact, to call this a dog whistle would be an insult to the hearing of dogs!
I, for one, can assure you that my eyes are the first to roll into the back of my head when conservatives conflate Denmark or Sweden style socialist-capitalist societies with communism or pure socialism. But they say you should call a spade a spade, and so I call the redistribution of wealth at the destruction of aristocratic social class of billionaires and the replacement of the entire capitalist system, communism.
So, why is it so difficult to just say so? We are on a university campus, a far cry from the days in American history where communism and other extremist beliefs were social taboos.
The reason for this is because the community is still not understood by the vast majority of people, and for good reason. It doesn’t take being an economist to understand that after taking all the collective wealth of our society’s billionaires, it really would disappear as a drop in the bucket of the 22 trillion-dollar deficit the government has created.
The United States government could have done anything remotely equal to Bill Gates’ innovative solutions to the world’s sanitation problems. Even with twice the money he offered, the U.S. government could not have accomplished it. To suggest that they could is more than laughable, it’s ruinous!
So, naturally, after also exhibiting excellence in handling the nation’s finances, society should trust the government to solve the environmental crisis. Such thinking follows an obvious trend. I won’t be the first to say it and I’m sure I won’t be the last, but when people argue how society would have looked like or should look like, they are purely arguing that they want to control society’s issues.
But, thankfully, they can’t. No one can. That is the wonder of federalism and capitalism. Nonetheless, if you work really hard your whole life and accumulate enough wealth, then you can make a difference. Just like Jeff Bezos. To Jeff Bezos, I say thank you.
If Flax was worried about the collective good, then he would have been championing the “mom and pop” shops and small business owners that were decimated by the rise of corporations like Walmart and Amazon. But he doesn’t mention them at all. He raises some concern of the hardship endured by Amazon factory workers. It’s almost as if there is a trend here.
Perhaps he takes his line of argument because it’s more socially vogue. It is “woke” to suggest the means of production ought to be transferred to the government. Mind you, this would be a nearly impossible undertaking!
I, for one, do not want to live in Flax’s society. I’d rather continue to live in today’s America. I want to join in working to solve the hardest problems. Bezos helps to create that environment. He empowers us; he does not cut us down, as Flax suggests.
Some define craziness as doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. The converse should be defined as sensibility. It is sensible to support capitalism, for it has produced the most affluent society in history.
Finally, we arrive at our conclusion and the reason for this article. There’s a certain smell about Flax’s argument that reeks of ideology. Only narrow ideologies choose to exist on specific axioms that are not permitted to be broken.
Even if you object to capitalism, you have no place to object to a donation towards environmentalism. The only reason for it is blind dogmatism. To Flax, you must look beyond your absolutes. You ought to recognize the gray.
Our nation has grown tired of ideological arguments. We are ready for pragmatism. Our nation has grown tired of purity tests. We are ready for cooperation.
Tyler Eddy ’21 is an astrophysical science major, with certificates in computer programming, Russian language, and applied mathematics.
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