Skipper, I think free enterprise is great, but that some regulation is necessary so that monopolies are not allowed to develop. I don't know if you read the column I attached in the url, but it details the unethical, controlling aspects of the way he operates.
We have had this debate here before, and I continue to maintain that big businesses without any government regulation act totally in their own selfish interests, without any thought to their impact on society. I think it is important that smaller companies have fighting chances to bring innovative, new products to the marketplace, and I think everyone benefits by the competition.
James Cameron, the director of "Titanic", gave back $8 million producing and directing fees and forfeited his future cut of gross receipts, which could be about $15 million more. He felt he should do that because the studio was getting very nervous at the expense, and the length of the shoot. I think I am begining to agree more and more with his ideas about money (from Newsweek). "Great wealth makes me uncomfortable," he says, sitting in his spartan house in the Malibu hills, its dining room decorated with dinosaur fossils. "Great poverty would also make me uncomfortable--I would like to be clear about that. But I look around at the evils of the world, and so much of it can be attributed to the concentration of wealth and power with a few. Never was that more clearly seen than in the microcosm on board the Titanic."
The Bible says "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
Mark 10.23 & 25
And according to Buddhism, "Riches make most people greedy, and so are like caravans lurching down the road to perdition. Any possession that increases the sin of selfishness or does nothing to confirm one's wish to renounce what one has is nothing but a drawback in disguise."
Jatakamala 5.5 & 15
When I first read Ayn Rand, when I was MUCH younger, I found the experience inspirational in the sense that I became more focused on realizing that I created my own reality. Since then, the uglier (to me) side of philosophies like this have become more important, and I was wondering the other day whether the rationalists reject religion because of their own intellectual ideals, or because the ethical currents running through all the major religions stressing the importance of NON-selfish behavior and non-materialism are just things they cast aside in their amoral search for the most goodies--more, more, more, just for the sake of more, for power. Bill Gates epitomizes that for me.
Incidentally, just what benefits do I reap from his achievement, that I could not have realized from technologies produced by others? |
