Opinion: Omidyar’s Market-Based Giving Hurts World’s Poor

Billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic network pursues a free-market “neoliberal” brand of giving that worsens conditions for the world’s underclass and widens economic inequality, according to news and opinion site NSFWCORP.

The article examines Omidyar Network’s investment in microlenders such as SKS Microfinance and BRAC, which have been criticized for using strong-arm tactics to collect from poor borrowers; its advocacy and financial support for school privatization in the United States and Africa; and its association with prominent libertarian economist Hernando de Soto.

“Omidyar Network’s philanthropy reveals Omidyar as a free-market zealot with an almost mystical faith in the power of ‘markets’ to transform the world, end poverty, and improve lives,” a worldview “inherently hostile to government, democracy, public politics, redistribution of land and wealth, and anything smacking of social welfare or social justice,” write Mark Ames, and Yasha Levine. Since the article was published last month, NFSWCORP has been bought by tech-news site PandoDaily.