Filed Under: Anything Peaceful
Tags: Bill Gates • capitalism • market equilibrium
Gates on Market Superiority
Matthew Bishop interviewed Bill Gates the other day for The Economist about Gates’ letter that he wrote to citizens. It’s worth watching for a number of reasons. First, because of what Mr. Gates has to say about the role of private enterprise in social aid (approximately 2:19 into the interview), and second, because of his discussion of market equilibrium and related productivity (six minutes into the interview).
Comment by Carl Clegg on 29 January 2009:
I have mixed feelings on Bill Gates. On the surface he and Warren Buffet appear to be the icons of capitalism. However, Warren Buffet is a registered Democrat and supported Hillary Clinton and then Obama in the last election cycle. Gates is not very vocal on politics but historically has championed a number of liberal causes (gun control and urban renewal policies to name a couple). On the flip side, it’s nice to see the vast array of projects that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is taking on to improve the world. Is not this how charity is supposed to work — volunteers who donate their own time and talent and in this case, vast sums of money, to help out others?
Comment by Kevin Carson on 3 February 2009:
Any praise of free markets from Bill Gates should be taken with several pounds of salt. Microsoft, along with the RIAA and MPAA, belongs to a coalition of Copyright Nazis whose profits depend mainly on government-enforced monopolies.For that matter, the tech industry is one of the most intensively state-capitalist sectors in the whole economy–and that’s saying a whole lot. Probably more than half of its R&D, from WWII on, has been funded by the military. It’s probably no coincidence that the most profitable sectors of the global economy follow business models heavily dependent on “intellectual property” [sic], direct subsidies, or both.