Philanthropy and the Plutocrats...

Plutocrats, in the oligarchy that is the United States of America, want affection for their attempt at assuaging their consciences, known as philanthropy.  

The plutocrats are:

Speculators who made enormous fortunes by moving money from here to there, supposedly (without actual evidence thereof) creating value, on Wall Street.

Microsoft made it's fortune when IBM made a massive mistake of undervaluing it's creation of the PC.

Intel made money for it's shareholders on that same IBM mistake.

Apple made money for it's stakeholders from Xerox's mistake, similar to IBM, when they misunderstood the Graphic User Interface (GUI) as a toy created at their (tax write-off) Palo Alto Research Center.

There are many similar stories, across the country, of the almost unbelievably wealthy... And yet those wealthy folks would have everybody else think the world was clusters of peasants, living in lean-to shacks (located on packed earth trails), till there was THEM.

All these companies, individuals/stakeholders who created them, made major profits off technology created by the innovations developed under the auspices of the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). Check 'em out. If you're a taxpayer, you made 'em happen.

All the, “stakeholders/shareholders,” inundated by said wealth paid lobbyists to help them avoid taxes... Even though they were, still are, massive users of common-carrier infrastructure, GPS, Internet, public education, electric/telecommunication grids/backbones and FFRDCs; the stuff they spent decades avoiding the costs of.

We, the taxpayers, were largely responsible for the basis of all that wealth; individual fortunes. The donations that philanthropists make now rarely do anything but help build more wealth, while still avoiding taxes on all that booty.

Would that they were to try to pay back the value of the taxpayer funded assets they've depended upon, they'd all be much more modestly wealthy; multi-millionaires, approaching a billion, instead of multi-billionaires.

Pity them that they don't get credit for being generous with the money taxpayers made possible... Not!