Daily Reckoning on Buffett's Charity

I thought this was a nice encapsulation of Buffett's folly:

People occasionally appreciate the truth in the same way they appreciate a good joke. It breaks the monotony. But it is to falsehood that they look to organize their lives. Myths stick to them like burrs to a sweater.

For example: Warren Buffett is giving away his fortune because he doesn’t want to corrupt his own children with too much wealth. “I have given them enough so they can do anything,” he says, “but not enough so they can do nothing.” The Sage of the Plains also strongly supports death duties, because he believes it is better for babes to start out life like worker bees - each one an exact duplicate of the other.

But they don’t even start out equal. Not in America. Not anywhere. Warren Buffett was born into the most privileged ranks of American society - the son of a U.S. congressman. Not everyone is so lucky. Of course, not every scion of a political family makes good. And few make as good as Buffett.

But the man from Omaha can’t exactly claim that he started life on an equal footing with the average man, most of whom never get close enough to a congressman to shoot him, let alone have dinner with him every night.

For some prior thoughts of mine on Buffet's social theorizing, I'd refer you to an earlier post:

Questionable PC Pablum Item #1: Buffett Would Not Have Survived 2,000 Years Ago. Well, there were money changers and tax men in the Bible, and no doubt Mr. Buffett's talents would have been useful there. Perhaps he means 30,000 years ago, but I'm sure he'd be there happily perched in the top of a tree, thinking what fools people are to try and fight tigers and bears when trees were safer, plus they had all this great fruit. This self-effacement is probably a defense against the reciprocal - that Buffet might have some inherited advantages, and keeps him palatable for wide consumption. [...]

Questionable PC Pablum Item #2: Life Outcomes are Luck; Governments are Good at Adjusting for that. Buffett espouses a way of thinking that says in order to understand a society's fairness, you have to imagine life outcomes as the result of a "cosmic lottery" where we all draw tickets that determine what advantages we receive. As a theoretical tool, it isn't bad when you try to explain why the legal system has to be fair, but applied more broadly, it discounts the effect of intelligent observation and lots of action in pursuit of positive outcomes.  For a man who is happy to call people "fools" all day long based on folksy common sense, it seems strange that he would result to the equivalent of "efficient markets theory" to explain social outcomes.