For the Love of Money
Dear Colleague:
What would possess a man of intelligence and wealth to spend millions of dollars to impose on the families of the developing world the aggressive and often coercive promotion of sterilization, contraception and abortion? The case of Warren Buffet, billionaire.
Steven W. Mosher - President, Population Research Institute
For Love of Money
Until the rise of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet was the world�s wealthiest man. Even today, with $21 billion at his disposal, he comes in a healthy second. He is the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, an investment corporation, and the majority shareholder in Coca-Cola, Dairy Queen and numerous other companies ranging from newspapers to candies.
Web sites and magazines devoted to money matters idolize Warren Buffet as a financial and investment genius. The �Buffet Way� of investment is emulated the world over.
Despite his wealth, however, Buffet is something of a miser. Unlike Gates, who has put billions of dollars into his foundation, Buffet�s foundation is a repository of a meager $22 million. Where Buffet eclipses Gates is in his fanatical commitment to population control.
Indeed, Buffet�s foundation is known for funding projects that other foundations, even those similarly inclined to limit human numbers, will not touch. The controversial abortion drug, RU-486, was in part funded by Buffet, who provided $2 million to the Population Council, the chief U.S. promoter of the deadly drug�s legalization.
Another $2 million went to Family Health International for the development of quinacrine hydrochloride pills, which once inserted into a woman�s uterus causes a severe chemical burn that scars shut her fallopian tubes, thus rendering her sterile. Quinacrine sterilization has become a favored method of sterilizing minorities by the Vietnamese government, not known for its strict observance of human rights.
It is possible to understand why radical population controllers, radical feminists, and radical environmentalists dislike humanity. After all, their idea of Paradise is the Garden of Eden before the creation of Adam and Eve. (The radical feminists, of course, would only oppose the creation of Adam.)
But it is hard to understand why a man like Warren Buffet, so blessed with material goods, should take so misanthropic a view of the people with whom he shares the planet, and from whose existence he profits. Surely he knows that the Indians, for example, are tremendous consumers of Coke.
Has Buffet fallen prey to the wrongheaded view that by denying the poor their progeny he will somehow aid their development? Or is it that he simply doesn�t like them?
Whatever the reason, there is something tragically wrong here. Some of the wealthiest men in the world descend like avenging angels on the populations of the developing world. They seek to decimate their numbers, to foist upon vulnerable people abortion, sterilization and contraception. The real needs of these people, for clean water, good seed, and a safe homeland, are ignored.
"The love of money is the root of all evil," the Apostle Paul told Timothy nearly 20 centuries ago. (1 Timothy 6:10.) To the extent that great wealth makes its owners contemptuous of the poor, it is the cause of a great evil: the expenditure of billions of dollars to push abortion, contraception and sterilization on vulnerable families of the developing countries whose only crime is that they are not as wealthy as Warren Buffet.
Steve Mosher is the president of
Population Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to
debunking the myth that the world is overpopulated.
(c) 2001 Population Research Institute.
Permission to reprint granted. Redistribute widely. Credit requested.
