Abigail Disney has always been very, very rich, or, as she describes it, “too rich”. The money came with her name: she is the granddaughter of Roy Disney who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney Company in 1923. Disney, 61, refuses to say how much she has, but acknowledges she would have been a billionaire in her own right had she not realised in her 20s that it was her fortune that was making her miserable, and decided to start giving it away.
I’m not sure what “too rich” is or how you measure it, but if she felt that she wanted to give money away that’s absolutely fine. Other wealthy people have done likewise. I’m all for such generosity – not least that giving money away means that they can choose who gets it and that it is spent in a manner that they decide.
Abigail Disney is part of a small but growing group among the super-rich, calling for a wealth tax to help fund the recovery from the pandemic. The Patriotic Millionaires movement, of which she is a longstanding member and key spokesperson, started in 2010 with only a handful of signatures on a 163-word open letter, including the musician Moby and Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream co-founder Ben Cohen. It has grown into a global organisation with more than 200 members, including Chuck Collins, heir to the Oscar Mayer hotdog fortune; Morris Pearl, a former managing director at BlackRock; Danish-Iranian billionaire Djaffar Shalchi; and Sir Stephen Tindall, the founder of New Zealand’s largest retailer, the Warehouse Group. They describe themselves as “proud traitors to their class” united in their concern about the “destabilising concentration of wealth and power”.
Quite apart from money given to the government going to waste, there is the ethical consideration here. If she wishes to give her money away, good on her. She does not have the moral authority to insist that others have their money forcibly taken from them by the state. Disney’s ideas are highly unethical and immoral.
Virtue signalling at its finest.
All the people mentioned are woke, and so logic tells me there is something in it for them. I’ll bet that a bit of digging into the money trail would uncover some pretty dodgy deals and profits to be made. No one just gives money away without a return on their investment.
Could this come under the banner of giving the money earned from the graft of others away? The govt’s also good at pissing money they haven’t done a single day’s graft in their lives for.
Such generosity is meaningless when vast wealth has fallen in your lap by fate of birth.
By all means give money away if it pleases but don’t assume others who might actually bear the scars aches and constant pain of a hard work shortened life of genuine toil would be equally keen to see their earned wealth being taken by our rulers to prop up their years of folly, all because some virtue signaller.
“…help fund the recovery from the pandemic.”
Shouldn’t that be help fund the recovery from the government’s insane response to the pandemic? Rocketing sky high taxes have always been successful in promoting economic recovery in the past haven’t they?
Regarding the subject of the OP, if I had more money than I could possibly spend in a lifetime, giving it away would be the thing that would make me happy. I would however, be very careful about who benefitted from my generosity, it is fairly obvious that I would become a magnet for various kinds of parasite. The obvious question here is, do I want to decide for myself who benefits from my benevolence, or should I hand my cash over to the government and let a bunch of utterly venal imbeciles decide for me?
Utterly venal imbeciles who would piss it up the wall.