Buffett loves his kids, right?

To me, the most radical and amazing thing about the Buffett gift is that he's deliberately shutting out his kids from the great majority of his wealth -- not out of spite, but out of concern for their character. Reading Buffett's comments on the way inherited wealth debilitates the character of subsequent generations, you can't help thinking about the Kennedys. But I suspect many of us are acquainted with well-off families whose decline can easily be traced through the generations, almost always having to do with how privilege, one way or another, corrupted the younger generations.

When I was out visiting friends in Silicon Valley a few weeks back, one of my pals told me that this is a constant source of concern for the higher-level executives out there. Given the nature of the industry, many of those execs did not come from wealthy backgrounds, and made their money quickly. I'm told they're worried about what being raised in exceptional privilege will do to their children's character. But I didn't hear that any of them had any substantive strategy for dealing with this. I don't know that I would either, if I had that problem (and believe me, with the way the newspaper industry is going today -- a voluntary buyout program was announced at my paper today -- that's not a problem Your Working Boy is ever likely to have).

I doubt I would have the strength of character to do what Buffett is doing, and cut my kids out of so much of my fortune. Mind you, if he leaves each of them with a piddling billion each, that's still an insane amount of cash, so I don't feel all that sorry for them. Still, I would quite naturally want to give my kids every way possible to protect themselves against catastrophe ... even though as somebody famous once said of the spiritually corrupting power of wealth, "It's easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven."

It's fun, though, to think about how you'd give your money away if you had a fortune to distribute to charity. I'd give a pile to my high school, and a lot to various religious charities not affiliated with any bishop or church bureaucracy. I'd want to give a bunch of it to causes to help abused and abandoned children, and also to organizations fighting for religious freedom. I'd be interested in setting up a foundation to provide financial help for urban and rural projects designed to renew communal life along the principles I wrote about in "Crunchy Cons." And I think it'd be fun to have something I'd call the Newspaper Fund, which would exist to cut checks to people you read about in the newspaper who have suffered some sort of catastrophe, or at least a big setback, and whose lives would be improved for the better by a significan financial gift. You know, the single mother you read about inside the Metro section whose apartment burned down, and now she's got nowhere to live with her three kids. Buy her a new apartment, anonymously. Things like that.

How would you give away your billions, if you were Warren Buffett?