When Isabel and I were both working for a living we paid lots of taxes. Uncle Sam still takes his cut and Florida gets a little, but our taxable income is less now so we fall into a lower tax bracket. Taxes are part of life in a civil society, and although like many cruisers we have a bit of Libertarian in us, we also believe a civil society must include strong civil institutions, law and order, protection of national interests, promotion of sustainable environmentally friendly economic growth, etc. The citizens, residents and visitors that benefit should help pay for it.
Back then US tax policies encouraged a fair bit of charitable giving, and we did our best to maximize the tax benefits while contributing to causes and institutions we wanted to support, also bellying up to the bar when an important cause surfaced regardless of the tax implications. Heifer International offered a way to help folks in the poorest countries of the world, closer to home we supported children's schools for the arts, National Public Radio, etc. and it made us feel like good people. Now we're pretty removed from that life and can't even itemize our taxes. We look for other ways to have a positive impact on people we may never meet. For the people we do meet in these foreign lands, we do our best to represent the best of our native cultures and be the kind of folks they might like to have as friends. Learn a few local words, smile, wave at cars going by as we walk down a road. Can't hurt.
Conscious capitalism is a concept that's becoming more prevalent around the world, and these days in US at least it seems that visionary leadership seems to be the domain of the emerging business world. Companies much younger than me understand the advantages and strengths of a diverse work force. They seem more likely to exploit resources in a more sustainable fashion, working on solutions to problems just now appearing on the horizon, imagining products and services that will create a better world. Their founders and employees recognize that older generations have handed them a "turd in a punch bowl", staggering national debt, a disregard for the environment with a return to filthier air and water standards, foreign policy that continues to produce blowback, ad nauseum.
Part of our investing philosophy is about promoting a vision for a better future as both a supplement and an alternative to charitable donations. Where is technology headed and what companies are trying to solve the world's toughest problems and working to improve everyone's life on planet Earth? We essentially make loans to folks we've never met so that they can grow a company, fund research and development, and hopefully solve a hard problem. With luck perhaps we get repaid at an interest rate better than what a bank savings account offers, or our personal metric of beating the S&P500 aggregate return.
Loaning money to a small company working on bleeding edge treatments or cures for such things as cancer is pretty risky, with plenty of potential to lose everything. Consider the comparison to charitable contributions; in both cases our money disappears but when we become partial owners of a small company our investment might not only return our capital with interest, but also a cure for some form of cancer or other nasty disease. Our earlier charitable giving was purely based upon the faith that the administrators would use our money as they claimed they would, operating with low overhead and not paying themselves exorbitant salaries. Nowadays we use a service that researches and recommends our flavor of investment opportunities, and we donate money to various causes including a cruising friend's GoFundMe campaign to buy books for school children in Fiji.
Recently we watched Netflix documentary "Inside Bill's Brain". The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation using its vast resources to benefit the poorest people in the world. Wow - worth a look. Be like Bill.
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