On Greed

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.

I’ve had this "money speech" from Atlas Shrugged on the bulletin board over my desk for about a year now.  It's great, and I hope you'll hit the link and read all of it. 

There are three ways to get money:

1) Steal it.
2) Win it/Inherit it/Find it.
3) Swap something of value for it.

On the other hand, there are three things you can do with money:

1) Have it stolen from you/Lose it to taxes.
2) Give it away.
3) Swap something of value for it.

When we say that someone is greedy, we usually mean that he hangs on to more of his money or more of his “stuff” than we think a normal person would. He doesn’t give away much of it or swap much of it for other stuff.

But if the greedy man came by his money honestly, through methods #2 or #3, that means he either swapped something of value for the money, or someone else did (probably a parent) who wanted him to have the proceeds.

Webster defines “Greed” as “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed”. Whether the following people have that selfish and excessive desire isn’t really known, but they do have far more than is needed. They lead off the Fortune 400 list of richest Americans. Here are the Top Ten:

10. Alice Walton | Worth: $20.9 billion (Wal-Mart)
9. Jim Walton | Worth: $21.1 billion (Wal-Mart)
8. Sheldon Adelson | Worth: $21.5 billion (Casinos)
7. George Soros | Worth: 22 billion (Hedge Funds)
6. Christy Walton | $24.5 billion (Wal-Mart)
4. David Koch | Worth: $25 billion (diversified)
4. Charles Koch | Worth: $25 billion (diversified)
3. Larry Ellison | Worth: $33 billion (Oracle)
2. Warren Buffet | Worth: $39 billion (Berkshire Hathaway)
1. Bill Gates | Worth: $59 billion (Microsoft)

I’m writing this on a computer that uses Microsoft programs, I just finished shipping four truckloads of display equipment to Wal-Mart, the facility I’m working in has leased 30,000 square feet of space to TTI (owned by Warren Buffett), and I read websites partially sponsored by the Koch brothers every week. (The Agitator, Cato, etc.) I have no idea what Larry Ellison does, but I’m sure that this laptop is a better machine as a result. George Soros is the only outlier, in that I can’t quite determine how he’s made my life better, other than donating vast sums of money for drug policy reform in the U.S.

Some of these people give away vast sums of their money. Others don’t.  But they didn't have to give away their money to enrich my life. 

By Webster’s definition, though, all of them still have enough money to be considered “greedy”. They’ve wound up with far, far more than anyone needs.

How did they do this happen? Did they steal it? No. Did they find it? No. Did the government give it to them after taking it from someone else? No.

They, or someone in their family, provided goods and services that were worth more than money. You and I voluntarily gave the Waltons, Bill Gates, and the Koch brothers some vast sums of money in exchange for stuff they provided – garden hoses, underwear, or groceries (in the case of the Waltons) software (in the case of Gates) or oil (in the case of Charles and David Koch).

They Ellisons, Gateses, Waltons and Kochs don’t need or want all of the stuff that their money will now buy. And they don’t want to sell their companies.

Bill Gates wrote computer programs that I’ve purchased. Millions of other people have swapped their money for his computer software.  But dammit, I can’t think of a single thing I could create that Bill Gates would want to buy from me.

I want what he’s got, and I want it badly. Bill Gates doesn’t want anything that I have.

Which one of us is greedy?  And which one of us does the world need more of? 

Bill Gates - Outsourcer, Destroyer Of Jobs, and Evil, Evil Man

In the late 1980's, IBM was poised to open a major typewriter manufacturing plant in rural Kentucky. 
The building they constructed to house this project was almost 1,000,000 square feet. 

You can go here to see the proud history of IBM typewriters.  Notice how the history ends in the late 1990's. 

Most of this is because of one man. 

Bill Gates. 

He eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S. typewriter industry.  His software packages have also eliminated American jobs at the U.S. postal service, secretarial positions, and the printing industry.  The job losses that can be laid at his feet probably number in the millions.  And yet some people consider him a hero.

Please do your part to reverse this trend.  Take whatever device you're using to read this, lift it high above your head, and smash it into tiny little pieces.  Then go buy a typewriter.

Create jobs for America !!!  Boycott Bill Gates and all others who try to eliminate jobs in the name of lower prices and better products for consumers !!!

Becker, Krugman, and spending other people's money

Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker has some more to say about Warren Buffett's assertion that Warren Buffett is undertaxed.... (Buffett is currently in a dispute with the IRS about how much he owes in back taxes, BTW.) 

Warren Buffett has persuaded 68 other billionaires to follow his example and promise to give at least half their wealth to charities. But why hasn’t Buffett proposed also that the very rich make large gifts to the federal government to offset what he considers ridiculously low taxes on their incomes and wealth? My guess is that he and the others who pledged to give away their wealth to charity would have little confidence in how the government would spend such gifts. Buffett, for example, is giving most of his wealth to the Gates Foundation, not to the federal government, and is relying on how this foundation will spend his vast gift. Given this reluctance to make large gifts to the federal government, why should anyone have confidence that the federal government will spend additional tax revenue in a sensible way?

Go here to read Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman's assertion that we need to either print, borrow, or steal enough money to give the government so they can't crank out another stimulus package. 

Can anyone out there name a single instance of wisely spent stimulus money?  Anybody?  Anybody at all? 

Here's a highlight from Krugman's editorial:

Although you’d never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs. The deficit obsession has blocked a much-needed second round of federal stimulus, and with stimulus spending, such as it was, fading out, we’re experiencing de facto fiscal austerity. State and local governments, in particular, faced with the loss of federal aid, have been sharply cutting many programs and have been laying off a lot of workers, mostly schoolteachers.

And somehow the private sector hasn’t responded to these layoffs by rejoicing at the sight of a shrinking government and embarking on a hiring spree.

O.K., I know what the usual suspects will say — namely, that fears of regulation and higher taxes are holding businesses back. But this is just a right-wing fantasy. Multiple surveys have shown that lack of demand — a lack that is being exacerbated by government cutbacks — is the overwhelming problem businesses face, with regulation and taxes barely even in the picture.

No, no, no, no, no.   The United States government is going to spend more this year than it did last year.  They're going to spend more in 2012 than in 2011.  They're going to print or borrow the money to do this. 

ObamaCare is not yet repealed. 

Card Check is not yet dead and buried. 

Our government has not yet taken the suggestions of The Libertarian Party, and gotten the hell out of the economy.  And our government is really, really crappy at intervening in the economy. 

That's enough to make the U.S. a crappy place to do business, or hire people. 

I'm betting that Paul Krugman has made some good investments in his day.  If Congress passes another stimulus package, someone should challenge Krugman to "invest" in the same companies that Pelosi/Boehner/Reid pick for stimulus spending. 

Seriously, can you imagine someone saying "My broker is Barack Obama...and when Barack Obama talks, people listen !"  (This is a 1980's reference.  Sorry for the obscurity.) 

Bill Gates Wants To Pull Up The Ladder, Or At Least Break The Lower Rungs

From the February 13, 2008 edition of The New Republic:

In the corner of one of the Microsoft cafeterias, you can find a chunk of the dismantled Berlin Wall. And, for a time, this seemed like an appropriate home for this relic of the twentieth century.

I love it. What's the point of winning the game if you can't take home the trophy? Papa Bush didn't give us any parades or fireworks when the Berlin Wall fell, so this will have to do.

During the 1990s, it truly felt as if communism had given way to the software behemoth, or at least the brand of capitalism that Microsoft had come to represent.

No, communism gave way to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul Jr. Corporations like Microsoft were a factor, in that they allowed Commie Captives to see what life was like on the other side. And let's be honest: Dumb ideas eventually die.

The casual placement of such a potent symbol of oppression, standing in the shadow of the gamers and marketers in the sushi line, struck the triumphalist note of the zeitgeist.

Speaking of gamers, I have one request for Martin Peretz, Editor-In-Chief of The New Republic, and possible author of this unsigned editorial that I'm fisking: Please, please, please hire a "gamer" to get your website running. This is the second time I've tried to link to a New Republic piece. The site is down more than it's up, which means I have to re-type your stuff word for word.

But that optimism has long since faded.

Faded? Faded? Last time I checked, East Germany was doing ok. And Poland. And China. Berkeley's prospering. Time Magazine's poster boy Putin is doing well in Russia, but it has turned into a mafia state, run by the same gangsters who ran the place when it was The New Republic's poster boy.

And Bill Gates has traveled one of the more interesting ideological journeys of our times.

As someone named "Brian" commented on Samizdata, this ideological journey is the standard "Pull Up The Ladder I'm All Right" routine.... Capitalism creates rich people. People who are rich don't want there to be any more rich people as this creates crowds in the places only rich people can afford. I don't know that I'd go that far, Brian, but there is a tendency for some people to raise the drawbridge once they've accumulated their personal pile of plunder....

Over the past decades, he (Gates) has gone from poster child of capitalism to critic of it.

Brian, I take it all back. He's trying to pull up the ladder.

Last week, he spoke about the limits of the marketplace at the Davos Economic Forum, where the elite gathers annually for deep chin-tugging and self-congratulating: "We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well."

Maybe we could set up a system honoring Free Trade, Individual Rights, and Contract Enforcement, with no monopolies, and have minimal Government Interference? Would that help "poorer people"? It would?
Cool.
There's a name for it already: Laissez-Faire Capitalism.
Kinda like they have in the rich countries.

Through his philanthropic ventures in Africa, he claims to have observed the limits of the market, where advances in health and education never wend their way to the downtrodden.

Is that because of a market failure, or is it because Africa has governments that make our House of Representatives look like The School of Athens?

According to The Wall Street Journal, he (Gates) has begun reading deep into Adam Smith's oeuvre: and not just The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

This is great news. Because when Gates delves into Adam Smith (founder of economics), he's going to come across quotations like this: "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." This is Adam Smith's way of begging us, begging us from beyond the grave, to please leave everything alone....

It's not surprising that his criticism of the market - and his call for morality to take its place alongside profit in our calculus - has earned him the derision of certain conservatives.

Let's see what Adam Smith had to say about the morality of the market: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages." That's in every Economics texbook I've ever seen, including the ones translated from Chinese.

Writing on the National Review website, Larry Kudlow sniveled, "So I just have to smile when billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros turn cold shoulders to the blessings capitalism bestows....Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn't noticed, it was a miserable failure."

Larry Kudlow doesn't need any support from me....but how does The New Republic know that Kudlow sniveled? Don't you have to be present to detect sniveling? Wait, I was mistaken. I just looked it up.
Sniveling means to complain or whine tearfully.
But Kudlow sounds pretty pleased with himself, getting paid good money to point out the obvious. A more accurate term might be "Larry Kudlow rejoiced," or "Larry Kudlow smirked". And the reason for all this rejoicing and smirking from Mr. Kudlow? It's not that The Soviet Union fell, or that Socialism was thoroughly discredited. Kudlow is smirking because he writes for a magazine whose damn website works. Go ahead, hit the National Review link up there. Their website works ! So does the website for The American Spectator ! Ditto for Reason magazine ! And Liberty magazine ! Evil Free Market Capitalist Pig magazines have websites that work ! ! ! !
Then try to log on to The New Freakin' Holy Republic. And then try again and again and again. It'll make you snivel every time. Does anyone else see a strong correlation here???
Ok, back to the original article:

Of course, Kudlow's criticisms are risible. Gates doesn't want socialism and isn't calling for the nationalization of industry. He wants businesses to devote more of their resources to spreading their products and technologies to the poor. "Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don't fully benefit from market forces," he said.

Smith agrees with Gates: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."

In fact, it's precisely at this point in Gates's logic that we begin to have problems.

Yeah, right about the time Gates started making sense.

He deserves an ovation for his philanthropy. But there are some problems that are beyond even the reach of a $38 billion foundation. And, while we admire the courage of his criticism of the marketplace, his remedy (calling on business to lend a hand to the poor) hardly seems up to the task. There are grave problems in the world that only government can alleviate, because only government has the scale and reach to help remedy them.

And, in the words of my mother, if you make a mess, you're the one who needs to clean it up.

And, while business can act on behalf of the common good, it will almost always act in its own self-interest - a tendency that often places it on a collision course with morality.

See the quote above about the butcher, brewer, and baker. Leave the butcher, brewer, and baker alone, and they'll take care of the hungry people. The hungry people have something that the butcher, brewer, and baker want in exchange for their butchered, brewed, and baked products, whether it's labor, money, or good will. When China discovered this, 1 million people per month started leaving poverty. But there's usually something in the way.....

In other words, the state can never provide a sufficient solution, but smart, effective government is a necessity.

Yep. A government that enforces contracts, provides a safe environment, prevents monopolies, and that's about it.

That's not to diminish his accomplishment. Gates has done a noble thing, breaking with the hardened consensus of the business elite. We simply await the completion of his journey.

A journey that I hope will end somewhere near Washington D.C., not near the center of harmful government intervention, but near the home offices of The New Republic, where they badly need some website help.