The legendary investor and the world's second richest man Warren Buffett has decided to donate most of his personal fortune or US$37 billion of shares to charity. It is a world record. Buffett's total share holdings by Sunday’s prices amount to $44 billion. Over 80 percent of the donation goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, established by the world’s richest man and Microsoft founder.

"I don't think I'm as well cut out to be a philanthropist as Bill and Melinda are," Buffett said. "What can be more logical, in whatever you want done, than finding someone better equipped than you are to do it? Who wouldn't select Tiger Woods to take his place in a high-stakes golf game? That's how I feel about this decision about my money." Buffett plans to give the remainder to a foundation named after his late wife Susan Thomson Buffett and three others run by his children.

The foundation set up by Gates in 1994 is funded at $30 billion, the biggest in the world. The Gates Foundation contributes between tens and hundreds of millions a year to the fight against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis and children's education in developing countries. Gates has said many times that he will donate to social projects all of his $50 billion property, minus only $10 million for his children. Announcing a while ago that he will stand down from his executive position with Microsoft in 2008 to concentrate on his charitable activities, Gates said, "I believe that with great wealth comes great responsibility, a responsibility to give back to society, a responsibility to see that those resources are put to work in the best possible way to help those most in need." In that area, the world's richest and second richest men have achieved history's biggest merger.

Buffett is a pioneer of "value investment" -- long-term investment in blue chips whose price fluctuates according to short-term factors; Gates was a leader of the IT revolution. In the Western tradition, private property is a core human rights on a par with the right to life and freedom. It is no exaggeration to say that private property ownership has been sanctified. Among American entrepreneurs, there is a venerable tradition to accumulate fortunes ruthlessly but, once successful, to give back to society unsparingly. Examples include Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Paul Getty. The vitality and health of the American capitalism that leads the world originates here.

Korean business culture, by contrast, keeps records only when companies make money but none about how the money is used thereafter, while a pre-modern state power forces donations of private property by applying pressure through public opinion. Perhaps it is because of this climate that charity on the scale practiced by Buffett and Gates seems a kind of miracle.