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Bill Gates: Tax Rate Does Not Impede Us-Ayn Rand Was Wrong

Posted by khalling 9 years ago to Business
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check out the comments. I think we know one of the posters :)

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  • Posted by ObjectiveAnalyst 9 years ago
    The emperor has no clothes. The authors hit piece is transparent and devoid of empirical evidence.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Your interpretation is certainly a possibility, but we always have to check premises, our own and others' premises. Perhaps that person is not mentally stable. "Seemingly sane" may not be.

    I will say this. The number of people with diagnosed mental disorders is higher than I can remember it. The amount of cognitive dissonance is definitely at an all-time high in the US. The rational conclusion may be that there are a lot of emotionally unstable people out there. Certainly not all people are unstable, but when Little Johnny Producer gets brought down at an early age so that a good-for-nothing kid can be praised, is it any surprise that there is a lot of cognitive dissonance out there?
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  • Posted by khalling 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Yes, blarman. There is also no acknowledgment of what more
    could have been created in the private sector without such burdensome taxation and regulation.
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  • Posted by $ jdg 9 years ago
    The last time I saw Gates in person, he was saying "There's no such thing as a patent troll." Let's just say I don't give much weight to anything that comes out of his mouth.

    He is also the idiot responsible for "Common Core." So if his foundation has lost half the money it would otherwise have to the government, that may be a good thing.
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  • Posted by $ blarman 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Gate mixes a truth - that advances have increased quality of life - with a falsehood - that $40K from 20 years past is worth less than $40K now. He's trying to get the reader to gloss over the lie by attaching it to a truth.

    I don't disagree with anything you've said, I'm just pointing out the lies that he's intermingling with the truths and likening it to Rome's downfall because I see a direct parallel. I don't buy the fat, dumb and happy mantra he's trying to sell.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    So how are you going to pay for what society demands and WILL vote for. Socialism failed. It only presented the problem. Strike one. Capitalism which has alway been under government control was, initially the tool of the wealthier classes who cared not a whit for the general pubic. Strike Two. it's all in how you view it. Unfortunately all the naysayers have yet to propose an alternative that can do better IF citizens control government. Have to open your mind a little bit. The origin of socialism was based on 'bridging the chasm between those few who owned everything and the many who did all the work.'' The failure was in their adopting the very ways they were supposedly against including a fairly closed ruling class who viewed the public as cannon fodder and baby factories.

    Your turn. Present an alternative. Notice I said best of. You have to provide your own shit which is decidedly not the best of. A self fulfilling prophecy or view of history.

    Have a nice day it took me fifty years to figure it out. But absent the looters, moochers, grubbers, warlords and witch doctors and the defeatists?

    Who knows maybe one day a few thousand generations from now what is possible.
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  • Posted by LibertyBelle 9 years ago
    It looks to me like another guilt-ridden "limousine
    liberal"; but especially disappointing in the case of
    a self-made man. You can't tell me that it does not
    slow things down when someone works for some-
    thing, achieves something, accomplishes some-
    thing, and then it is taken from him by force.
    Of course, he has a lot more money than the
    average tycoon; and, possibly, he has such sim-
    ple tastes (as I believe I would still have) that
    when a big chunk is taken away, he doesn't no-
    tice the loss. But that would not be so in the
    case of a small-business enterpriser. It is un-
    fortunate that Gates does not show the sense to
    stand up for himself, and also does not care
    when the rights of his fellow property-owners are
    violated.
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  • Posted by strugatsky 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Putting the best of capitalism and the best of socialism together is like... a glass half full of sugar and half full of shit. Any may you mix it, it still smells the same...
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Sad part is when you put together the best of capitalism a financial system with the best of what socialism was supposed to be (and it is not a financial system) You get the best of both IF you can stay away from the worst. Countries like Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand and now China (the largest capitalist nation in the world or close to it) are edging toward that goal while countries like Russia, England and the US are running in the opposite direction - not together - int three opposite directions. The unions have shot their wad yet there is room for another version. The US has turned to a financial and physical cycle of repression. Russia is in the midst of their Wild Wild East as they struggle to experience a compressed form of historical development. Three times the USA showed the way then failed to follow it. When the great struggle of the Socialist Century of Wars is over - since it spilled into the next one I'd bet cash money on the ascendency of China into a democratically chosen Republic mixed with middle kingdom mandarinism and their present party's Gung Ho slogan which means move forward together harmoniously, winning the top spot world wide. Their twin assets of population and education hampered by not enough raw materials and not enough food production capability make them the Japan of the 21st Century.If they also don't choose the wrong path as did England, the USA and quite possibly Russia.

    Easy for me to say. I've been there and am no longer hampered by the name a better place fallacy. That place no longer exists.
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  • Posted by strugatsky 9 years ago
    Follow the money, especially with Gates. Of course, he is happy with the current crony-capitalist / socialist system - he has a monopoly. The government is his partner. Gates, and Microsoft, for that matter, have never created any technology. What they did create was a monopolistic empire by buying where they could, steal where they could not, and having the government act as their lieutenant with those that resisted. When you have a monopoly, what difference does it make how high the tax rate gets? You raise prices to compensate, while those same barriers keep the competition at bay. For Gates, it’s a marriage made in heaven. As for his “charitable” work in Africa – let’s not be so naïve – he’s buying Africa.
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  • Posted by freedomforall 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    imo, Gates compromised when he should have invested in a new country (gone Galt) instead of thinking he could bribe the looters.
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  • Posted by coaldigger 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    I cannot accept that any intelligent, mentally stable human is not rational. When a seemingly sane, smart person speaks irrationally, I ask "What is he/she trying to achieve by deception?" Failed social systems are not rational, altruism is not rational. What should I conclude?
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    The writer bent over backwards to take that shot.
    In fact, the article may have well been written before it was decided to insert Ms. Rand's name into the title.
    Solely due to that title, head, heading, whatever you want to call it, the article looks like what Rush Limbaugh would call a hit-piece by the drive-by media.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 9 years ago
    Perhaps Mr. Gates' vast fortune causes him to live in La-La Land. His statements are so off the mark that had he been anyone else say a regular Joe Lunchbucket, his comments wouldn't be considered at all except for far left so-called economists.
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  • Posted by NealS 9 years ago
    Perhaps if Bill had finished school, but then again that might have moved him even further left. It's too bad that his money can influence so many changes in our lives that only go in the direction he and his followers want. I praise his charity work, but his charity dollars probably are equal to his dollars for things like Common Core, gun control, and other things he should stay out of. How can a person with his wealth feel any different? I believe he has no idea how high tax rates might effect the middle class and the poor. The rich could give a hoot, it's the little guy that struggles trying to keep up.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    When Gates, Buffett, and now Larry Ellison promise to give away their fortunes late in their lives, they are every bit as much Galt's adversaries. By doing that the poor will never feel the pain of their poor judgment until after Galt is old enough to not be able to capitalize on his productive years.
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  • Posted by bsmith51 9 years ago
    My objectivist comments were and still are subject to "moderation."
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  • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Purchasing power doesn't measure the ability to purchase something that didn't previously exist. How much money would your current cell phone have cost in 1995? There is no answer to that question: no one in the world could have the cell phones we carry now at any price.
    How much would it cost to buy a drug that hadn't been invented, or some other improvement that no one had created.
    I'm not supporting the government soaking up as many assets as possible and putting road blocks in the way of the producers. I am, however, saying that people are still producing, making things that make our lives better.
    People below the poverty line (an artificial limit drawn to assure that there remains plenty of clients) have access to more than kings of old.
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  • Posted by coaldigger 9 years ago
    I believe these guys have truly gone Galt. If they kept their money invested in their enterprises with their minds, they would have produced more and more, while we did less and less. As the leaches became hostile to the hands that were feeding the trough, they said "fine. Take it. It is gold to us but it will be poison to you." They have withdrawn leaving a fools legacy and can bask in the adulation of the pigs that they are leading to slaughter. The disgust that they feel for us must be amazing!
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  • Posted by $ hash 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    There's really nothing wrong with wealthy people giving away their fortunes near the end of their lives. What else are they going to do with them, especially if they don't have children?

    And the existence of such magnanimous private charitable activity is a great argument against the claim that a welfare state is needed to help the underprivileged and the sick and disabled. There can be no doubt that in a world not hobbled with extortionist tax rates and crippling bureaucracy and red tape, the amount of private charitable activity would be orders of magnitude higher than it already is today.

    The history of private charitable activity clearly shows that no welfare state is really needed to provide genuine assistance to those who are _actually_ in need through no fault of their own, as opposed to the able-bodied parasites the welfare state creates.

    (Not that a welfare state would be morally justified even if historical empirical evidence suggested that it did seem to be 'needed').
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  • Posted by $ hash 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Yeah, I didn't mean to imply any comparison to Gates who is more in the Jim Taggart / Orren Boyle category.

    I just meant to point out that a lot of the actually productive people are misguided in a similar way to how Hank and Dagny were - thinking that it's better to fight to fix the system rather than to abandon it.

    It's always better to escape from any society that is premised upon enslaving you and to maximize your own freedom, even if that means dealing with various challenges that will come up.
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  • Posted by $ blarman 9 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Only if one ignores inflation. Income is a misleading thing - purchasing power should be the focus. And our purchasing power today is actually lower than it was then because of stagnant wages and higher burden of government, to say nothing of the impending financial crisis ergo our debt. Does the Internet provide greater opportunity? Without question. But without the ability - read purchasing power - to take advantage of those opportunities, is there really positive change?

    Gates can sit back in his estate in Redmond and watch the world go by. He can blithely ignore the 50 million on food stamps and the abysmal labor participation rate - the results of the policies he turns a blind eye to. He can afford to watch our debt spending destroy our future. He advocates misdirection (squirrel!) to attempt to get us to turn aside from the reality that our country is on life support and if we don't stop hemorrhaging welfare spending, our nation's economy is going to completely collapse. And what good will the Internet be then?
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