Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Bill Gates, more than anyone, straddles that sometimes thin line between capitalist and oligarchist.  What worries me is that few know the difference between capitalism and oligarchy, and will inevitably push oligarchical policies on poor nations in an effort to lighten the burdens of capitalism, further subjugating them to poverty and oppression.

"Monopolists hate real capitalism, precisely because they hate competition.”

I had a conversation with Milton Friedman many, many years ago during which said that your average business entity wants free enterprise for itself and not for its competitors. I.e., they’re all infected with monopolistic tendencies. Competition is the only thing that holds those tendencies in check. Maybe all capitalists hate capitalism.

I think the real problem here is that anyone who believes that significant market failures require intervention from nonmarket forces ends up getting accused of hating all markets for all purposes. I don’t hear Gates going extremist (especially if one looks at what his investment money is actually earmarked to do — a substantial chunk is designated for making markets more accessible to rural farmers in underdeveloped nations). I hear Gates saying “I’m intervening with private funds where I see a market failure.”

Now whether that is, in the end, a good thing; or whether that is, in the end, merely redistribution of monopoly rents to avoid criticism; or whether that is, in the end, an attempt to establish a brand-affiliation basis for sales of Microsoft products as those economies develop; or whether that is, in the end, merely another tactical move in a play for world domination as part of a Conspiracy; whether any or all of these are true, is another issue entirely.

TO: Lawrence Kudlow, et al.
RE: Gates & Capitalism

I’m reminded of that comment in an old scifi novel I read long ago....

“Power enobles. Absolute power enobles absolutely.”

Reputedly stated by the man who invented the Spherical Corporation, in said novel.

The name of the book....The Space Merchants.

Regards,

Chuck(le)

Years ago billg boasted that he had but a single lobbyist in DC.  Then the US Government, acting at the behest of his assorted competitors, tried to put him out of business.  Now he has loads of lobbyists.

Maybe what he’s objecting to isn’t capitalism, as such, but the sort of watery fascism foisted on us byour Imperial US Federal Government.

"He’s an inveterate monopolist and has been since the beginning. Monopolists hate real capitalism, precisely because they hate competition.”

In fairness to Gates, the *reason* he’s a monopolist is because Microsoft didn’t make the mistakes its competitors did and rarely behaved like a typical monopolist; one that rests on its laurels and allows competitors to catch up. Start up Word or Excel and look at the Save As… dialog, you can see all the defunct file formats that represent the history of the companies that lost on technical grounds. MS as a monopoly is a fairly recent chapter in the company’s history. They started in 75 and it wasn’t until 1995 that they had a *competitive* graphical OS; that was about when the “browser wars” started. Until then there were many competing versions of DOS and IBM’s OS/2 was years ahead technologically. Remember, also, that MS didn’t have any office applications worth speaking of and actually got their start writing them for Apple’s new Mac OS.

I think they’ve certainly become a monopoly in recent years, especially with their willingness to make deals with media companies that are blatantly anti-consumer, e.g. Zune’s obsessive focus DRM that crippled its main selling point. But its absolutely false to say he was from the beginning, not if you remember the history of the company and of the industry.