Yeah, Yeah. First they came for John D. Rockefeller, then they came for IBM and AT&T, then Bill. In a few billion years, we may all be reincarnated as ruthless cutthroat monopolists, and they'll come for us too.
Who's the next monopolist the trustbusters are going to go after? Who has any chance of getting into a position anything like Microsoft's current position? With its all important "innovative" business plan of leveraging the desktop monopoly to take us where we want to go? You too must be free to imitate, I mean innovate, eh? Where's the monopoly you're going to leverage? Let me know when you get one established. Oh, there's always the Mind of Reg(TM), you got a monopoly on that one all right. Lots of leverage, too. Me, I'll worry about the next monopoly when it shows up.
As to the original "capitalists", high school civics guy chuckles there too. Yeah, they were into property, though Jefferson couldn't get his prefered phraseology into the Declaration of Independence, much less the Constitution. They tried to get something like your "socio-economic majority" thing passed, but it didn't work out that way. They also had this problem with slavery, slaves worth 3/5 for apportionment, but the slaves didn't get any of that 60% in voting rights, or any other rights for that matter. What would they make of Bill? Hard to say, but I sort of doubt they would have liked being told where they wanted to go anymore that the rest of the rabble these days. Ayn Rand is a founding parental unit only in the minds of the "Who is John Galt" crowd.
Oh, and on your favorite topic of lobbying. Bill's the leader of the pack in software by a big margin. Demonstrating of course what a naive software engineer he is. If he wants to maintain the monopoly, though, he better start looking at what the cable guys and RBOCs spend, it's on another level.
Cheers, Dan. |
