No, Professor Duffy, the use of ex- or active - military personnel to render aid is not controversial. It's a widely accepted and successful practice.
Yes, exactly this. Not "can provide the aid", but "first to the punch". You really hit the nail on the head.
The morality of massive wealth accumulation -- and the morality of various mechanisms for changing that accumulation -- is definitely something that reasonable people can have a polite and respectable debate about.
But it is absolutely unacceptable that wealthy individuals are beating government to the punch in disaster relief and preparedness. COVID-19 is the dry run, and the USA has absolutely failed on such a profound level that we should have actual existential concerns about how broken our government has become (and there's plenty of blame to go around).
I really hope the outcome is "competent government, regardless of size, and sabotaging implementation is treasonous" as a bipartisan consensus.
The US government can put Sergey to shame... if it wanted to. But it's unlikely that it will anytime soon.
Little has changed about the US foreign aid budget in the last several years, despite your attempted pitch. The foreign aid budget has not been slashed, the US is still spending around ~1% of its budget on foreign aid, the same level it was spending under Obama.
Here are the foreign aid disbursement numbers by year:
2012: $46b, 2013: $46b, 2014: $41b, 2015: $48b, 2016: $47b, 2017: $45b, 2018: $46b, and 2019 disbursement figures are partial in the foreign aid explorer.
Mostly the US is failing to boost its foreign aid. Trump doesn't control the US budget (he has some limited influence) and there is a split power situation in the US Congress.
The US still provides approximately 1/2 of all global food aid, and has been doing that for a century. The US typically provides 300% more global food aid in a given year than all of Europe combined for example.
4% of the world's population, providing 50%+ of the world's food aid. Those selfish Americans, routinely saving the world from famines and hunger for a century and saving tens of millions (not a typo) of lives in the process.
"The United States is, by far, the world’s largest international food-aid donor. Almost every year since the 1950s, it has been responsible for more than 50 percent of the billions of tons of food shipped from the parts of the world with a surplus to the parts of the world that are hungry."
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-u...
The US is also still keeping millions of people alive in Africa that have HIV/AIDS, courtesy of PEPFAR.
Now identify a country that could respond with a similar level of aid in less time. Not more aid in more time, but just “beat to the punch” with a useful initial response. Citations preferred.
In my opinion, it is great we have ultra-rich people who decide to spend their resources in ways that help others in ways the government currently isn't able to.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...
He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers -- but he did basically create the "rich guy gives away his money as a social obligation" model of... maintaining... democratic... government? Or, to be less coy, model of staving off communist/socialist/fascist revolution. I truly and sincerely hope today's ultra billionaires are as smart and realistic as Carnegie in this respect.
Carnegie emphasized education in his giving. Limited success. His library movement was largely successful, but his trade school turned into yet another hyper expensive prestinge-driven private university. Although I guess it was the brith-place of a lot of the computer technologies that made the current crop of ultra billionaires rich.
I think we're over-due for someone to emphasize healthcare in their giving. (Gates did this, but not in the USA.) We're also over due for a labor backlash against this sort of obscene wealth concentration (and not even as a value-laden statement... just as a "lessons from history" thing, the pendulum will probably swing).
"In 1900, he donated $1 million for the creation of a technical institute for the city of Pittsburgh, envisioning a school where working-class men and women of Pittsburgh could learn practical skills, trades and crafts that would enhance their careers, lives and communities."
It was not until the dawn of the computer era that things started to change.
https://www.cmu.edu/about/history.html
See this link for more details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Institution_for_Scien...
Some astronomical observatories built atop certain mountains were built with his funding.
That’s interesting. Why would he “lay siege” to workers? Were they hiding somewhere behind fortifications, and he was trying to force them to work, or what? It’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where capitalists would even find it useful to “lay siege” to workers.
5. Niger: Wealth per Adult: $1,017 Niger is the largest nation in West Africa, but more than 80% of its land area is in the Sahara Desert, so it is prone to drought and famine. The GDP as of 2017 was $9.87 billion, but the wealth per adult remained low despite economic reforms.
Reference:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/managing-wealth/112916...
So no, I don't think that any billionaire is even remotely close to being able to sustainably spend what any country-level government can.
For another reference: the smallest GDP listed at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no... is ~$40B, and government spending is usually some 10s of percent of GDP.
