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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (16871)	1/29/1998 11:54:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Is Bill Gates a closet liberal? salonmagazine.com Liberal? This is far too mild a term, from the "what do you think we are, Communists?" days we know that Bill has fully and completely endorsed Marxism. I guess this is part 2 of the warm and fuzzy Bill campaign. In 1997, Bill Gates contributed $35,000 in support of a Washington state ballot initiative supporting gun control. In 1993, he ponied up $80,000 to fight a conservative initiative seeking to roll back state taxes. And ever since 1994, the William H. Gates III Foundation, Bill's private philanthropic funnel, has been busy channeling millions to groups that specialize in "reproductive health and family planning." Gates is far from the first plutocrat to turn his attention to social welfare -- the tradition goes back at least as far as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. But Bill Gates has always enjoyed a singularly apolitical reputation. Unlike the dynamo tycoons of yesteryear, Gates is a cipher, a platitude-spouting uber-entrepreneur who is indistinguishable, in the public eye, from his alter ego -- the formidable, and rapacious, Microsoft corporation. That we all know and love. Indeed, given Gates' current obsession with prying the Department of Justice off of his corporate back, one might assume that if the man has any political sympathies, they would most likely be of the techno-libertarian bent. Certainly, his struggle with the federal government has been adopted as a cause c‚lŠbre by many Net-based libertarians. Now they tell me. I guess Objectivists just don't rate, though. Sorry, guys. But for once let's try to separate the man from the Microsoft. Look at the personal checkbook record: pro taxes, pro birth control, against guns. The evidence is clear -- Bill Gates is a bleeding heart do-gooder liberal. Hey, he's not my hero for nothing. It's not Windows 95 for sure, despite the integrity and uniformity of that experience. But, Bill says he's going to give it mostly all away, and I take that statement more seriously than some. Apparently the parental units are offering encouragement on this front. I better not say any more bad things about the Deuce, though I still think the "politically naive" line is for the, uh, politically naive. Cheers, Dan.