Shooting an Elephant

Let’s ask weighty questions about philanthropy!

What a negative bastard I am, that I don’t think the world of Bill & Melinda & Warren E’s highly noble goal of donating $3 billion a year of their hoardings. I don’t care about all the fabulous good they will accomplish thereby. I don’t see any of the promised solutions to the world’s problems as being nearly such glorious goods as to justify the processes that led to this situation, meaning the processes that gave these jackasses so much power in the first place.

It’s all about the power. That’s all I see. Who elected these twits? Who really believes that these people actually deserve all the money (= power) they have to throw at us?

Don’t get me wrong. At heart I’m a screaming conservative. Watch me rant and rave on behalf of the rights of people to live the way they did during the Stone Age. I’m for Detached Accessory Dwelling Units, because I want Big Government to stay the hell out of my garage. I was vehemently opposed to the Supreme Court decision on eminent domain, because I didn’t think our Founding Fathers thought replacing George’s fighting bantam farm with a Wal-Mart constituted “public use.” I’m so opposed to Big Government I think we should all be allowed to run naked and drunk in the streets, and all of us enjoy public cockfights and bear baiting, if you know what I mean.

But there’s such a thing as Big Money too. It shouldn’t exist in the first place: no one, in the history of the world, nor any group of three people, has ever truly earned $60 billion. Bill & Melinda & Warren E didn’t just recently sit themselves down on a log and wipe the collective sweat from their brows and say “Whewee, that was a whole lot of work hoarding all that money the last thirty years, now let’s rest up a spell and pass some of it out.”

But back to the power. It occurs to me that we all might benefit from a little Gedanken experiment. Or in this case a Gedungen experiment. Because when I think of elephants in the house, I think of elephants.

Let’s imagine that they weren’t about to give away $3 billion a year in money, but $3 billion a year in elephants. What would that look like?

Let’s see. One elephant costs 1,000,000 rupees or less. That’s around $20,000. Figure in the $500 per year to feed one at wholesale prices, plus costs of keepers and temporary housing, 2.26 cents per ton-mile for railroad freight, 78 cents per ton-mile for air-freight, at about 5 tons per animal, and out comes the rough answer: The cost of obtaining, maintaining, and shipping elephants to anywhere whatsoever averages less than $100,000 per elephant. So Bill & Melinda & Warren E have the equivalent of at least 30,000 elephants per year to give away around the world. That’s one pachyderm to give to every 200,000 people, per year.

So if the elephants are distributed equally, and dropped in by helicopter, it should be virtually raining elephants everywhere on the planet. “Mbuzi! A present from the Gateses and the Buffett is about to land on your Mother’s hut!”

Or say they give them to cities and towns rather than small collectives. What would it do for Seattle to have an influx of 2.5 elephants per year? “Thank you Bill et al, our Mounted Police have never looked so Hannibalish! How retro!”

People are such suck-ups; you know they’re going to fall all over themselves thanking their donors not only for the elephants but also for everything that comes with the elephants.

I guess that’s what I’m really talking about. Thank you Bill & Melinda & Warren E for your $3 billion a year, but you’d better not send any poop with it.