“You… can be a millionaire… and never pay taxes! You can be a millionaire… and never pay taxes! You say… “Steve… how can I be a millionaire… and never pay taxes?” First… get a million dollars.”
-Steve Martin
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Why doubtful? The Soviets put men in space, developed nukes, etc… OSSM advocates develop complex code without expecting a financial reward. Some of the most brilliant artists never make a dime. Do you believe money is the only thing that can motivate a person? What about the thousands of failures for every ‘success’? Are all those failures, all the inequality, all the greed poverty corruption and pollution (sorry, ‘externalities’) worth getting technologies developed a little faster? What about moderating capitalism? Can we get the benefits if we make rules or is it a force of nature? Are the products that are successful successful because they are superior or sometimes for other reasons?
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As with structural racism and so on, it isn’t about “is this individual deliberately acting in a malicious fashion?”. It’s “do the underlying structures of our society create injustice and suffering?”.
The point here isn’t “Bill Gates is a bad person”. The point is that the capitalist mythology used to justify wealth inequality is bullshit.
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Piketty’s point is simple: The system of capitalism is rigged to benefit the people at the top the most. Bill Gates, when he was innovating, built his fortune making personal computers mainstream. And then he stopped. And yet the system that we are all a part of continued to grow his fortune–and at a rate even faster than it grew when it was actively contributing to the world’s society in the form of the personal computer.
Picketty’s point is simple: Capitalism rewards “having money” more than it rewards “contributing to society”.
And the point of this article is that Bill’s wealth growth over time proves that point.
Also, welcome to BoingBoing!
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Another person who essentially said the same thing was Adam Smith. Man, The Wealth of Nations is just a litany of how bad capitalism is. I feel like no (classical) economist could have possibly actually read the thing.
It’s not that investment is a bad thing. Investment is a necessary thing for the kind of society we live in, and a good thing to a certain extent. The problems are twofold:
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Investment doesn’t always fund new technologies, start new businesses, etc. An increasing portion of investment is involved in an essentially mythical balloon economy (like the one the burst in 2008) that racks up dollars like they are high scores but that doesn’t produce anything.
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If Bill Gates invests and those investments are creating businesses, technology, jobs, prosperity, why is it that we assign so much of the gains to him after the fact? Basically money is power, and the person with the money is given a lot of power to demand a large cut of the returns despite having done nothing themselves.
To deal with (2), Piketty proposes a tax on capital. To deal with (1) we need laws like the kind instituted after the Great Depression to stop banks from doing shit like that.
Another good one from Steve Martin: “If you have a dollar and you buy a loaf of bread for 50 cents, you have 50 cents left. But if you have 17 grand and you buy a loaf of bread for 50 cents, you still have 17 grand. That’s math.”
“Capitalism” is like “racism” or “sexism”. It is discrimination based on the amount of capital you control.
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The other interpretation is that Bill Gates has stopped bringing out new versions of Windows, and he’s being rewarded for that philanthropic effort.
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Windows 10. Windows 8. Windows Vista. Your statement is invalid in the face of contrary proof. 
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One point I never see addressed is the imaginary nature of much of this wealth.
I don’t doubt the math, and I agree that massive inequality is an issue. But much of Gates (and other billionaires) wealth is locked up in stocks or ownership of companies. If Bill Gates wanted to write an $80 billion dollar check, he couldn’t, because selling off that much of his stock portfolio would immediately lower the value of the stocks. Imagine the headlines “Bill Gates to sell all of his Microsoft stocks, company value plummets”.
He can sell small portions, he can leverage his wealth as collateral for loans, use it to inspire others to donate or buy in or he can trade it for different stock, but he can’t realize his net worth without destroying it.
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So, again, what is the solution? Max limits on what you can earn or invest or profit from an investment?
I honestly don’t think Gates and others are affecting how much money I do or don’t make.
Bad investing is bad. And people/companies should be allowed to lose it all. Although IIRC, wasn’t most of the housing bubble investing more businesses behaving badly?
Are they? I have no idea what the return is. But a modest 10% return can add up quick if you are talking billions of dollars. But I assume that what ever investment contract was negotiated, that there were reasons for what ever was agreed upon. I mean, who ever is taking his investment money wants to make and keep money as well.
On the flip side, how much is he making from stocks and such? If he bought and sold Nintendo stock at he right time a few weeks ago he would have made a considerable profit.
I am not against taxes on capital, and it is possible the upper crust needs a higher rate. I also think we need to redo the code as so many custom made loop holes are in there. As for banks behaving badly, yes, 1) let them fail when they screw up and 2) I agree we need some oversight. Though the oversight we have is often too little too late and ineffective. An example would be the SEC knowing about Madoff turn a blind eye to him for years despite people voicing concern. So regulation can only do so much. Some people will always game the system.
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A surprisingly large amount of what we all call ‘wealth’ is similarly illusory. Our house is in a very ‘hot market’ so if we were to sell it we would have a chunk of money - as long as no more than a few of our neighbours do the same.
If the market ‘crashes’ then suddenly all that ‘wealth’ vaporizes, and we just own a bunch of well organized lumber and pipes that happen to keep the elements out. And yet we spend half our monthly income (life energy) to pay for the house. Madness.
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It’s a complicated problem, so it has complicated solutions. But, as a beginning:
- End the open bribery of US campaign finance.
- Heavily tax unearned (e.g. inherited) wealth.
- Stop wealth discrimination on access to basic human needs (healthcare, education, legal representation, etc.). Give real meritocracy a chance to operate.
- http://www.robinhoodtax.org/
Solution? No. But it’d be a good start.
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I didn’t say Microsoft has stopped bringing out new versions of Windows.
Just that Gates is no longer personally involved.
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Ooh. Stealing that quote
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You mean like Oliver Letwin?
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Hey, you said that he was being rewarded for stopping the release of new versions of Windows. Since they’re still being released, his efforts to stop them are apparently pretty ineffectual. 
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Yeah, I mean, I may be a simpleton, but surely “it takes money to make money” is the most basic description of capitalism?
Actually, it’s not a great CV entry, but it just might lead to a slightly better unpaid internship, which in turn…
Well, I mean, it did and it does. He never operated out of Silicon Valley, it existed before Microsoft did, it’s not actually dependent on MS-DOS/Windows for its current state (and much of the innovation in operating systems that MS mainstreamed actually were ripped off of actual Silicon Valley companies), and if MS never existed, some other, almost identical products would have taken their place, produced by other companies (because they existed previous to MS’s versions). Essentially, without MS, a bunch of competitors, some with better products, would have done better and been less screwed over by MS’s monopolistic business practices. A lot of companies and individuals got screwed over so Gates could accumulate those billions in the first place - it was (questionable) business practices rather than innovation that really distinguished MS.
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Capitalism’s bug is also its feature. Throughout human history the haves always lorded over the have-nots. And there were always way more have-nots than haves, even in the worker’s paradises of Soviet Russia, China, and Cuba. This is not remotely a new phenomenon.
What’s changed is that class mobility was far more rare in those systems than in capitalist systems. In other systems if you were born a have-not then you were going to die a have-not because you didn’t have the right kind of blood or political connections. Capitalism doesn’t change the existence of have-nots and haves, but it does introduce risk and chaos into class structure. As we saw in the 2008 bubble burst, people at the high end of have-enough suddenly didn’t. Meanwhile, have-nots have a path (albeit difficult) to become have-enoughs through education and labor (and yes, luck).
Capitalism rewards three things (that I can think of off the top of my head): labor, applied knowledge, and capital. That contributions are rewarded unevenly doesn’t change capitalism’s primary benefit to society, which is enabling class mobility.
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Bill Gates is only “worth” $90B if you happen to measure value in dollars.
When Thomas Piketty published his 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century, he said that capitalism’s primary beneficiaries aren’t those who make amazing things that improve the world (as its proponents claim) – rather, it favors those who have a lot of money to begin with.
That is what I have always said, it seems obvious. But what isn’t obvious is why others would let themselves be compelled to play the rigged game. If you would not train every day to run a race where some people get to start halfway to the finish line and wear rocket shoes, why would you participate in capitalism? I can sort of understand why some people favor their own rigged game - but not why anybody else would play it.
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If I say that Stark Industries has stopped manufacturing weapons, that doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped HammerTech from manufacturing weapons.
So, when I say that Bill Gates might be being rewarded because he’s stopped bringing out out new versions of Windows, that doesn’t mean necessarily mean that no one else is.
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Class mobility has been at it’s highest in social democratic economies which use a mixture of capitalism and socialism. Pure capitalism has shown itself to be pretty hopeless as a means of class mobility.
We also don’t have statistics on how systems like anarcho-syndicalism would change things (3 years in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War give us some hints but not enough to work with).
One of my complaints about the last six years is that the Tories have taken away funding to help disabled people get through higher education. I can’t do most entry level jobs because of my disabilities, most employers react badly to the idea that I’ll work when I can.
Capitalism in it’s current neo-liberal form condemns me to being a have-not, no matter how hard I work. Can you blame me for looking at alternatives?
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