From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Fri Nov 15 2002 - 12:39:55 MST
> (Dehede011@aol.com <Dehede011@aol.com>):
> From: Alexander Sheppard [mailto:alexandersheppard@hotmail.com] " Do you
> think the fruits of Bill Gates labor is really all that $50 billion?"
>
> Alexander,
> If you think of any inventor that has made a great invention it is
> true that they gave to us much more than we ever give or gave to them. Tesla
> died broke or nearly so yet he gave us AC electricity. Ford made a mint but
> even so what we gave him will never equal what he gave us.
> So, Alexander, I hear you and I do understand that it seems that Bill
> Gates has a lot of money but look around at the impact of the PC -- we will
> never repay him. The question in my mind is this -- how much do you want to
> steal from him?
> Ron h.
The sentiment here is certainly valuable, but let's not be historical
revisionists by calling Gates an "inventor". He did do some of the
coding on the very earliest products, but the vast majority of his
fortune came from products that were not innovative at all, and what
innovation there was he simply bought or hired, and a fair portion of
the income from those came from relying on government-enforced
monopolies. On the whole, I'm not sure how Gates' fortune measures up
on the voluntary/forced scale; on the one hand, the government used
force to break voluntary contracts in the name of "anti-trust", and on
the other hand they obligingly used their force to pretect his
monopolies in the form of copyright, so it's possible that in a free
world with neither of those issues he would have made the same money
anyway--though I suspect the copyrights accounted for more, so in a
free market he might have only made a quarter or a third of what he
made under present conditions.
Still, a furtune of 20 billion for selling bits that weren't very
innovative. So let's call it as it is: Gates is a billionaire because
he was a shrewd businessman, not because he was a brilliant inventor.
I don't for a moment think there's anything wrong with that--he
certainly did contribute that much value to the world, mainly by
hiring and directing other brilliant inventors.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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