Viewpoint: Felix Salmon

“Hedge fund manager John Paulson lives in a 28,500-square-foot townhouse just steps away from Central Park. Now he’s given $100 million to the park’s conservancy, a donation that has been called ‘transformational.’ But if you wanted to give $100 million to charity while making the barest minimum impact on the world, you’d be hard pushed to improve on Paulson’s performance. [Some] say the rich shouldn’t pay any taxes, and that instead they should ‘self-tax’ by giving their money to carefully chosen charities. While such donations are ostensibly in the service of helping others, in practice they tend to be extremely self-serving. The rich can give away more money than the rest of us. But that doesn’t make them any better at it.”

Felix Salmon in Reuters.com