In his preface to “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens expresses the hope that his “little book” would “not put my readers out of humor with themselves.” But he obviously wanted to induce soul-searching in some readers: the wealthy businessmen indifferent to the plight of the poor. And in some ways, he succeeded—the book was an instant best-seller and helped popularize philanthropy during the Christmas season. But the basic problem hasn’t gone away.
We still have Scrooges this holiday season, and the wealthiest of them—George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Tom Steyer—have inflicted far more suffering on the poor than Scrooge ever did to Bob Cratchit and the working class of his day. These billionaires may not seem like Scrooges, given their extensive philanthropy, but that’s only because most readers today don’t understand exactly where the original Scrooge went wrong.
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We think him of a greedy miser—a “clutching, covetous, old sinner,” in Dickens’s words—whose wealth came at the expense of the adults and children forced to live in squalid flats and toil at grueling jobs for meager pay. Dickens was inspired to write the story by a government report on child labor in mines and factories, and by the living conditions he had witnessed among workers at textile mills in Manchester and in Lowell, Massachusetts. Like the poet William Blake, who famously lamented the “dark Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens clearly saw the downside of nineteenth-century capitalism.
But there was an upside, too, which was why workers kept leaving their farms and other jobs to work in those mills. In the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, illiteracy was widespread in England (especially among women), life expectancy, was less than 40, and per-capita income remained stagnant. But during the nineteenth century, literacy rates, life expectancy, and incomes rose at unprecedented rates.
English workers’ incomes more than doubled, and it wasn’t just factory workers who benefitted. As domestic servants quit their round-the-clock jobs to work shorter hours in factories, their employers had to offer new perks. “It was now necessary,” one Victorian mistress complained in 1872, to allow the help “to go to bed at ten o’clock every night, and to give them an afternoon out every other Sunday, or no servant would stay.”
She seems as hard-hearted as Scrooge, who complains about giving Bob Cratchit a day off on Christmas and forces him to work in a frigid office. Scrooge is such a miser that he barely heats his own dilapidated home, where he dines on gruel beside a tiny fire. “His wealth is of no use to him!” his nephew sadly observes. “He don’t do any good with it.”
But this tightwad’s wealth was actually doing plenty of good. The savings from misers like Scrooge and his partner, Marley, financed the Industrial Revolution, as economists Phil Gramm, Robert Ecklund, and John Early have pointed out. “Since Scrooge and Marley never consumed the wealth they created, its use was, in reality, a gift to humanity,” they write in The Myth of American Inequality. “Even as Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Present pulled back his robe to reveal the children who embodied Ignorance and Want, the wealth accumulated by British investors like Scrooge was already beginning the long drive that would do more to end ignorance and want than all the governments and all the charities that ever existed.”
Scrooge’s great moral failing is not his miserliness but his indifference to the woes of the working class and the poor. When asked to contribute to a charity for those lacking food, he suggests they go to a workhouse. Told that some of them would rather die first, he replies, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
He’s justifying his callousness by invoking the Malthusian theory, long popular among intellectuals, that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply, producing a “surplus” of people. Malthus was utterly wrong—food supply has grown much faster than population—but his theory provided a convenient rationale for those arguing against aid to poor people who were supposedly doomed to starve eventually anyway.
The Scrooges of 2025 sound nothing like the original Scrooge: they acknowledge a responsibility to help the downtrodden and are famed for their philanthropic efforts. Yet they, too, have callously ignored the travails of the less fortunate, and they, too, have rationalized their indifference by seizing on dubious theories. And whereas Scrooge didn’t actively promote Malthusianism—he didn’t fund authoritarian population-control measures, as twentieth-century Malthusians did—today’s Scrooges have spent billions promoting their theories while ignoring the disastrous impacts on the poor and the working classes.
George Soros has wreaked havoc in low-income neighborhoods across America by bankrolling the campaigns of district attorneys who refuse to prosecute minor crimes or lock up violent criminals. His philanthropic network, the Open Society Foundations, and the organizations it funds have campaigned for policies to reduce penalties for shoplifting and other crimes, eliminate cash bail, and force judges to release repeat offenders, who often proceed to commit more crimes. These policies are justified as remedies for the supposed racial bias in the criminal justice system that Soros seems to blame for disproportionate rates of incarceration—a theory just as discredited as Malthusianism.
The consequences have hit hardest in the poorest neighborhoods: shoplifting epidemics, stores forced to lock up their wares or shut down, sidewalks commandeered by drug dealers and prostitutes, violent attacks and murders by repeat offenders released without bail. The crime and disorder have caused residents and businesses to flee, leaving empty storefronts and buildings, yet Soros keeps promoting these policies, ignoring the consequences as well as the backlash from minorities in those neighborhoods who have felt the impact and voted Soros-backed prosecutors out of office.
As mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg had the good sense to resist Soros-backed efforts to weaken law enforcement, but he has hurt the poor in other ways.
Bloomberg Philanthropies has been the leading supporter of the unethical campaign against one of the most promising public-health advances of this century. Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death globally, and those deaths occur disproportionately among low-income smokers in America and other countries. The best tool for weaning them off cigarettes is an electronic cigarette, which was been shown to be much more effective than other smoking-cessation tools (like nicotine gum or patches). Smoking rates dropped sharply after nicotine vaping became popular 15 years ago, a development welcomed by health authorities in Britain, who estimated that it eliminated 95 percent of the harm of cigarettes. The Royal College of Physicians has noted that nicotine “itself is not especially hazardous” and declared it “unjust, irrational and immoral” to deny safer nicotine alternatives to smokers.
But thanks significantly to Bloomberg, surveys show more than two-thirds of smokers in America and two dozen other countries believe that vaping is as dangerous as or more dangerous than smoking. Bloomberg Philanthropies has lavishly funded the long-running campaign to terrify the public with false alarms about vaping. In 2021, nearly two dozen academics and other experts on tobacco control wrote to Bloomberg urging him to change course and offered to show him evidence of vaping’s benefits, but they could not persuade him to meet.
Some of the fearmongers supported by Bloomberg, notably the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, are activists looking for a new cause now that smoking rates have been declining among youths and adults. Others are prohibitionists opposed to any use of nicotine—the “quit or die” approach. Their scare tactics have led to needless restrictions on vaping devices in the United States and around the world, including outright bans on nicotine vaping in Mexico, Brazil, Vietnam, and India. As a result of what’s been called philanthro-colonialism, most of the more than 1 billion smokers in the world have been either forbidden or discouraged from using a tool that could save their lives.
Bloomberg also provided support for public-health officials who promoted lockdowns and other Covid restrictions that disproportionately hurt the poor, though he was relatively restrained by comparison with Bill Gates. Through his public statements and philanthropy, Gates backed the lockdowns and other pandemic policies that proved singularly cruel to American children. Tiny Tim wouldn’t have had to wear a Covid mask in London (children under 11 were exempted), but Gates would have forced him to wear one in America. The European Union’s public-health agency recommended against masking children under 12, and the World Health Organization advised against it for children under six, but the U.S. recommended masking everyone starting at age 2—with the enthusiastic support of Gates, who called masks “pretty magical.”
The Microsoft cofounder advocated universal masking in schools and funded projects to promote mask-wearing, insisting that masks were “not that bothersome.” He ignored evidence that they interfered with social development and learning, especially for young children and those with disabilities, and he remained indifferent to the evidence from around the world that mask mandates and lockdowns had done little or no good while imposing enormous social and economic costs. In 2022, Gates published How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, which blithely proposed giving even more power to the public-health establishment—including a new international force of 3,000 “pandemic firefighters”—to repeat these failed strategies in the future.
But like Scrooge, Gates has repented in time for Christmas for at least some of his sins. After spending billions on his environmental agenda, including policies to reduce carbon emissions—a cause also funded by Bloomberg and Soros—he enraged his beneficiaries a few weeks ago by publishing an essay rejecting the favorite doomsday theory of modern intellectuals: that the “climate emergency” is an “existential threat.” Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote, finally recognizing that it’s not the biggest threat to the lives and welfare of poor people.
He noted that campaigns to halt the use of fossil fuels had caused food shortages in poor countries (by depriving farmers of synthetic fertilizers) and prevented the construction of power plants for people whose homes still lack electricity (over 700 million, mainly in Africa). Addressing climate change is important, Gates wrote, but it shouldn’t divert limited resources from the more pressing problems of poverty and disease.
There’s been no such contrition from Tom Steyer, the most shameless Scrooge of them all. After becoming a billionaire from a hedge fund that invested heavily in coal projects, he began spending his money to stop others from using fossil fuels. He and his advocacy group, NextGen America, fought oil pipelines and supported referenda and other measures restricting fossil fuels, especially in his home state of California. The state’s policies have caused oil refineries to flee the state and forced utilities to buy expensive green energy, saddling Californians with the second-highest gasoline prices in America and electricity rates nearly double the national average and higher than every state except Hawaii. Steyer is as responsible as anyone for those high prices—yet he now has the gall to run for governor on a populist platform denouncing the state’s high living costs. In one particularly oblivious campaign ad, he holds up a sign proclaiming, “Utility rates are too high.”
In the spirit of Christmas, it should be acknowledged that today’s Scrooges no doubt mean well—unlike the original Scrooge, they want to help the poor. But like him, they’ve done far more good for humanity through their capitalist investments than their philanthropy. Before they impose any more pet schemes on the world, they might consider Scrooge’s initial explanation for refusing to donate to a charitable cause. “‘It’s not my business,’ he said. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.”
Top Photo: Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg (CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP via Getty Images)