Bill Gates has moved on to his second career, using a large share of his – and Warren Buffett’s – accumulated funds – $30 to $40 billion – to make a difference in the world. I’ve got some thoughts about the options he has chosen, and some alternatives.

He seeks to cure malaria. A worthy goal. Nothing wrong with that. Success would remove a cause of human suffering. But we ought to be conscious of the side effects of such measures. And if the goal is to reduce human suffering, then something more needs to be done, above and beyond the things Bill Gates proposes, the things the Millenium Development Goals propose, the things Jeffrey Sachs proposes.

The measures that are proposed to fight global poverty are all fine, but they don’t actually get at the root of problem. In a sense, they might actually make it worse. Reducing mortality from, say, malaria will increase the population in the countries and regions where the measures are successful. What happens when population rises? Land values rise, and rent rises, as more people compete for a finite amount of land. Who benefits? Those who own land, and other natural resources are the big beneficiaries – and those who depend on land and natural resources (who doesn’t??) get to pay them for access to these factors on which their life and livelihood depend.

Pretty neat setup for the landholders and natural resource owners – individual and corporate, local and absentee – no? The stars are all aligned in their favor. And, sadly, aligned against the interests of the rest of us. Is it in the stars? Or is it something else, like a structure designed to concentrate wealth and spread poverty?

Is there another way to conduct ourselves? Will the stars fall from the sky if we adjust our tax system to treat these common assets as common treasure rather than private wealth machines?

Will Bill Gates work to change the tax system, or simply nibble at the edges of the causes of poverty so as not to disturb the wealth-concentrating machines, the powers-that-be in the various countries? Industrialists of another age saw the wisdom and goodness of a society that worked for everyone – even recognized their own self-interest, much as Henry Ford saw his own self-interest in paying his workers well. Joseph Fels. Tom Johnson. John Lincoln. Robert Schalkenbach

In the US, Bill Gates acknowledges that we ask teachers to do a hard job. Yup! But I wonder if he recognizes the dimensions of why that job is so difficult. When perhaps 40% of our children – and a larger share of our public school children – live in families who lack sufficient income to meet their own most modestly defined needs, how can teachers meet the needs of their students? (You’ve read Abraham Maslow. Maybe you’ve even read Clare Graves. Basic needs need to be met before we can move on to higher-level needs.)

Every school child in a class called Geography learns about what grows well in various parts of the world, and what natural resources each country has. But do we teach them that natural resources are rightly the common property of the people of those countries, and that America’s natural resources belong to all of us, since we hold it to be self-evident that we are created equal? Or do we simply tell them that to the victor belong the spoils, and slavery isn’t so bad because property rights are more important than freedom? (While we’re on the subject, shouldn’t the Iraqi people either receive a dividend for their share of the Iraqi oil, or be confident that the revenue is being used to provide the infrastructure and services which will make Iraq a good place to live – for all?

What’s the solution? Fix our poverty problem. That problem is both an income problem and an assets problem. (How? Read this blog. Read wealthandwant.com. Read answersanswers.com. Read Progress and Poverty.)

Should our landed gentry get the windfall, while all the rest of us pay them AND pay taxes? Should our resourced gentry get the windfall, while all the rest of us pay them AND pay taxes?

When 33% of our wealth is in the hands of 1% of us, and 57% of our wealth is in the hands of 5% of us, is it any wonder that at least half of the other 95% are struggling, and their children are at risk? It isn’t that the bottom 95% aren’t pulling their own weight, aren’t working hard enough. Rather, it is that we have permitted a wealth-concentrating machine to be built up in our midst.

Men lead lives of quiet desperation. Is that in the stars, or in how we structure our society and economy?? Hmmmm.