*** Spending the profits ***
gatesfoundation.org
<Contact
Joe Cerrell
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Phone: 206-709-3558
6.6.2001
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Announces Increase in Endowment
SEATTLE-- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today that in the first half of the year, Bill and Melinda Gates have given their charitable foundation an additional $2 billion....
....
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to improving people's lives by sharing advances in health and learning with the global community. Led by Bill Gates' father, William H. Gates, Sr., and Patty Stonesifer, the Seattle-based foundation has an asset base of $23.5 billion.>
I know most people whine, claim he's breaking some law, are envious, jealous and think governments should set the price of software and tell designers what to include and give market protection to competitors who can't do such a good job. I know many hate [I don't think that's too strong a word based on their comments] $ill.
I think $ill is one of the best humans who has ever lived - yes, yes, blah, blah, we can't compare across ages in ability, intellect, achievement etc, but with the help of the times available today, with huge markets and vast technological opportunity, $ill Gates is the greatest achiever on the planet. Profit is a quite accurate measure of the benefits given to others.
He's having a lot of fun doing all his stuff and killing cancer cells, malaria parasites, HIV viruses, providing New Paradigm libraries is a lot of fun. It's such a shame that the country which claims to be the pre-eminent promoter of capitalism has such an envious streak and supports whining competitors. Anti-trust laws were not set up to destroy charitable trusts. They were established to stop companies combining to form a trust with a view to forming a monopoly and getting higher prices [which I think should be legal but that's a different story]. Microsoft is not a monopolistic trust. It is not even a monopoly other than in the most absurdly narrow-minded view. All transactions [in a narrow-enough view] are monopolies, so picking on $ill is irrational.
Somebody like $ill is more likely to succeed in killing cancer than a bunch of taxpayer-funded bureaucrats who are more interested in forming a self-perpetuating tax-bludging institution and wielding power than succeeding in their task. $ill has NO interest in forming a perpetual 'let's kill malaria' organisation. He wants malaria DEAD!!! Then he can wind up the 'kill malaria' department and those who worked in it can go and do something else.
As $ill says, spending the money needs as much care as getting the money in the first place. For example, if he had some dumb idea or accepted some medical researcher's dumb idea for curing cancer, he could allocate $10bn and suck all the brains away from other cancer research. Then, when the dumb idea didn't work, the good ideas which otherwise would have been followed would have been neglected or not even thought of and not only would cancer not be killed, but there would be $10bn worth of effort destroyed in the process.
A LOT of care in spending is essential. Wrong spending would be worse than just giving all the money to the government to pay out in pensions. Or just returning it to Alan Green$pan to enable him more financial flexibility.
It could be returned to Alan by having a huge bonfire of money! That would be a real capitalist celebration. A huge bonfire of US$100 notes. That would also be educational in that a lot of people would think something was being destroyed. They would consider $ill Gates a total, mad criminal, destroying all that wealth. In fact, it would just be a pile of old paper [if he got notes due to go to be taken out of circulation]. In all the shouting, they might learn something about economics and the formation of huge profits.
Burning the money in a huge bonfire would be better than spending it on a dumb idea.
Anyway, congratulations to $ill Gates for a simply fantastic achievement in what he's done so far in providing billions of people with the benefits of Microsoft's software. Yes, billions. We all benefit from the use of the software even if it's our suppliers who use the software.
I hope he also cures cancer, kills malaria, HIV and perhaps enables humans to redesign their DNA so we are not born with software bugs in our DNA coils such as cystic fibrosis and the millions of other genetic problems we get which give humans the 'blue window of death' but for real.
I hope he sells billions of tablets, with QUALCOMM ASICs powering them. I hope WirelessKnowledge does something really good too - something I understand ... and makes a LOT of money.
Go $ill Gates!
Mqurice
PS: Here's a picture of $ill. I wish I had as many lightbulbs... microsoft.com |
