Letters to the Editor
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‘A Charter for Buffett And Bill Gates’
How curious that, on the same day, both your editor in “Buffett and the Poor” and in “A Charter For Buffett And Bill Gates” by William F. Buckley, Jr. (who used to be on the board of the Creo Society I founded in 1985, thereby helping us raise millions of charitable dollars for Rockefeller University and the American Foundation for AIDS Research) descried Warren Buffett’s comment about the weakness of the “market system” when it comes to dealing with the poor [Editorial, June 28, 2006 and OpEd, June 28, 2006].
Ironically, your editor used Mr. Gates’s support of EdVisions’ “educational entrepreneurship” to make a point. The point of EdVision’s contribution, however, is that it is (a rather thrilling) example of a NON-market system enterprise. EdVisions is “owned” by its workers, not its investors, which is a fact that supports the main point Karl Marx was trying to make before his theories were waylaid (as I’m afraid, such theories always will be) by self-serving power-mongers like Josef Stalin. The real problem with the “market system” is not that it excludes poor people from its services. In fact, it exploits them, and thereby profits hugely.
The problem is that market economies exclude everyone but the owners (usually members, as Mr. Buffett pointed out, of a “lucky sperm club”) from ownership itself. If such were not the case (that is, if the entire world lived in a truly Communist society), there would not be a single poor person left on the smiling face of the Earth. Until that time, the poor are fated always to be with us.
MARSHALL YAEGER
New York, N.Y.
‘Better Uses for Those Billions’
Like Alicia Colon in “Better Uses For Those Billions,” [New York,July 5, 2006] I, too, am puzzled why Warren Buffett is a major donor to Planned Parenthood. If he is truly interested in improving health care, why would he give money to an organization that destroys lives rather than saves them?
Is Mr. Buffett pessimistic about the future of the world? He must be. Otherwise, how do you explain his funding an organization whose mission is to see that fewer of us will be born to be a part of this world?
STEPHEN GILMORE
Charlotte, N.C.
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