I saw this and loved it and felt i should put it up here for the benefits of those who are not GYCA members, David
For Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, the ideal of valuing all
human life equally began to jar against reality some years ago, when
he read an article about diseases in the developing world and came
across the statistic that half a million children die every year from
rotavirus, the most common cause of severe diarrhea in children. He
had never heard of rotavirus. "How could I never have heard of
something that kills half a million children every year?" he asked
himself. He then learned that in developing countries, millions of
children die from diseases that have been eliminated, or virtually
eliminated, in the United States. That shocked him because he assumed
that, if there are vaccines and treatments that could save lives,
governments would be doing everything possible to get them to the
people who need them. As Gates told a meeting of the World Health
Assembly in Geneva last year, he and his wife, Melinda, "couldn't
escape the brutal conclusion that — in our world today — some lives
are seen as worth saving and others are not." They said to themselves,
"This can't be true." But they knew it was."

.....
"More important than questions about motives are questions about
whether there is an obligation for the rich to give, and if so, how
much they should give. A few years ago, an African-American cabdriver
taking me to the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington asked
me if I worked at the bank. I told him I did not but was speaking at a
conference on development and aid. He then assumed that I was an
economist, but when I said no, my training was in philosophy, he asked
me if I thought the U.S. should give foreign aid. When I answered
affirmatively, he replied that the government shouldn't tax people in
order to give their money to others. That, he thought, was robbery.
When I asked if he believed that the rich should voluntarily donate
some of what they earn to the poor, he said that if someone had worked
for his money, he wasn't going to tell him what to do with it.
At that point we reached our destination. Had the journey continued, I
might have tried to persuade him that people can earn large amounts
only when they live under favorable social circumstances, and that
they don't create those circumstances by themselves. I could have
quoted Warren Buffett's acknowledgment that society is responsible for
much of his wealth. "If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh
or Peru," he said, "you'll find out how much this talent is going to
produce in the wrong kind of soil." The Nobel Prize-winning economist
and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that "social capital" is
responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy
societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By
social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more
important, the technology and organizational skills in the community,
and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which
the rich can begin their work. "On moral grounds," Simon added, "we
could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent." Simon was not, of
course, advocating so steep a rate of tax, for he was well aware of
disincentive effects. But his estimate does undermine the argument
that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a
result of their hard work. If Simon is right, that is true of at most
10 percent of it."