The following exercise will give you a way to examine what you really think about the world around you, and how to improve it.
Let me sketch a plausible though highly unlikely scenario. A billionaire is told by his physician that he has a terminal disease. He is going to be dead in 18 months.
This man is nobody's fool. He knows that if he sets up a foundation and gives his money to it, that foundation is going to be staffed by upper-middle-class college graduates who have spent their careers as bureaucrats in the world of nonprofit charities.
It doesn't matter what this guy believes in, or what he wants to do with the money; he will probably not be able to do it in 18 months. Some team of bureaucrats is going to do it, and he is sensible enough to know not to turn a billion dollars over to a bunch of bureaucrats who are the products of the system of higher education in the United States, which is mostly an indoctrination system to produce liberals.
YOU'RE ROCKY BALBOA
So, he decides that he wants to get rid of a billion dollars over the next 12 months, so he can see some payoff from it. He has asked you to tell him what to do with the money. This is an Apollo Creed/Rocky Balboa situation. He picked a run-of-the-mill person to handle the giveaway. He really does believe that Bill Buckley was right 50 years ago, when Buckley said that he would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University. So, he picked your name out of the phone book. He makes you the following offer: he will pay you $1 million to help him give away a billion dollars over the next year. He does not even require that you quit your present job. If you can set up a system in your spare time that will enable him to give away the billion dollars, you get the million dollars. Would you take the deal?
This would be a huge responsibility. There will be consequences for giving away this kind of money. You do not have time to investigate 1,000 charities to which you are going to give a million dollars. You surely do not have enough time to investigate 10,000 charities to give $100,000 to each.
Here is the problem. It is basically the problem of investing. You want to diversify. If you give away a gigantic chunk of money to some organization, you can be sure that this amount of money is either going to paralyze the organization or else corrupt it. I don't care what kind of track record the organization has had in the past for doing good things. If you write that organization a check for a billion dollars, the organization is not going to perform at anything like the efficiency at which it has performed in the past.
Could you find 10 organizations that could take $100 million and not squander it? You could probably do it if the organization is very large, such as the American Red Cross. But then the money would simply be marginal. The outfit probably wouldn't waste the money, or least not waste too much of it, because it would simply spend the money on the same sorts of things that it has spent money on the past. It will be business as usual. It will be more of the same. It will be the same tune, but played by a larger orchestra.
What if the billionaire wants to change things dramatically? He wants his money to accomplish something unique, so that in the history textbooks, his billion dollars will leave a trace. He wants to get a footnote in the history textbooks. That's probably not too much to ask for giving away a billion dollars, is it? Well, these days, maybe it is too much to ask. But at least he may get a footnote in a monograph.
YOUR SOLUTION?
How would you go about solving this problem? You don't want to ruin an organization. You don't want to paralyze a good organization. You want to get a lot of bang for the billion bucks. You want to do something unique, where if this billion dollars were not spent on a project, nothing much would happen. There would be no trace of whatever this innovation would have been.
You would be allowed to set up an organization that would do something highly specific, with almost no authority on the part of the managers to re-direct the money. In other words, you would let the managers spend the money on an existing program over time, but they could not deviate from the plan. They could not become creative. They could not decide to re-allocate the money to their favorite projects.
I knew a multimillionaire over over 40 years ago who was advised by a libertarian economist who had considerable wisdom. The economist told me what his philosophy was in advising this man: "I want him to do something with his money that will not produce too much harm." He gave the man excellent advice. He helped the man set up a publishing organization that reprints classic books related to limited government. The books are produced in a handsome format. They are sold very inexpensively. The only authority that the managers have is in selecting the titles to be reprinted. The organization has a very narrow focus. It has had some minor impact. It has not done anybody any harm. It has helped a few thousand readers. Maybe it has helped tens of thousands of readers, although I doubt it. In any case, good books get reprinted, and students read them. The organization still has a lot of money in reserve, and it will continue to republish these books for decades.
Of course, in the age of the World Wide Web, there are better ways to publish books. The books should be published digitally primarily, and the money ought to be put into projects to promote the books. A lot of money should be put into marketing. Money also ought to be put into YouTube videos and PDF study guides for the books. But, as far as I know, there are too many restrictions in the organization's charter to allow managers to make these kinds of innovations. That's always the problem with tightly restricting an organization. There is always a trade-off between innovation and old technology.
So, what would you do? Sit down with a piece of paper and jot down some notes about what you think you would do. This will give you some indication of what you really believe in, and it will also present you with something you may not a thought about very much, namely, the great difficulty of implementing any program that is consistent with whatever you really believe in. If a project is big enough to be worth hijacking it, in order to get access to the money and the influence, you can pretty well rest assured that liberals are going to hijack it. Even if the liberals don't hijack it, then conservative time-servers will. They will feather their nests with the money. They will buy themselves lifetime employment with the money.
Maybe you are deeply committed to a religious perspective. Would you recommend that the money go to subsidize your denomination? What kind of effect do you think a billion dollars would have on the people who are presently of the pioneers in spreading your denomination's message? Having a billion dollars in a reserve fund is about the best way I can imagine to call a halt to the progress of that denomination. Watch the buildings go up. Watch the new employees get hired. Watch the paperwork triple. Watch the expense accounts expand. The experience necessary to deal with a billion dollars effectively takes decades to build up.
There is nothing like a billion dollars in reserve to compromise somebody's vow of poverty. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I wouldn't try to do it with my billion dollars.
CONCLUSION
I know what I would do with the money. But I don't want to interfere with your exercise in self-evaluation. I want you to do it first, and then tomorrow, I'll post an article on what I would recommend the billionaire to do with his money.
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