There are many times in my life where I’ve thought “I wish I had the time to make that part of the world OK again”. But invariably time and money always gets in the way of my goals for world improvement. (ok, and frequently politics).  (ok, and frequently over commitment to too many things that need to be made better).  Sometimes I wish I could just get paid to “do the right thing” of my choosing. Here’s a salary. Go forth and do good.

http://www.thegentlemensfund.com/nominate_form.asp

The problem is that little in the world works that way. Capitalism is founded on the belief that both sides of a transaction must prosper economically for the transaction to be beneficial. But when one side of the transaction is “the good of mankind” it turns out that the entity doesn’t have any cash to spend. And unfortunately the world works on cash (or at least my mortgage seems to think so).  Many times an idea may be good in theory but there is no way of having it “turn a financial profit” even if world would be better off with its instantiation.

Even if there was a “for world good” entity with funding to spend at will there is an inherent problem of trust of the common man. Even if only 10% of the world embezzled or drank their money away with nothing positive to show for it (and I only wish the percentage was that low) the average sponsor would be pretty distrustful of all the applicants.

So in the mean time, most of my grand ideas for world good (ranging all over the map from improved communication systems to improved emergency response solutions) will have to remain in my head until someone comes along willing to just pay people to “go forth and do good”.

What would you do, given unlimited funding “to just do good”?