At 04:27 PM 2/4/02 -0500, Nathan Newman wrote:
>The way Gates got rich was illegitimate but the way he is spending the
>proceeds is, as far as I can tell, quite admirable. He is following in the
>footsteps of the elder Rockefeller, but more consciously and earlier in his
>connection of private philanthropy to the broader social conditions.
-wasn't that a turnabout? i remember that he was roundly criticized a while -back because he wasn't much of a philanthropist. the argument was that -cyberlibertarians tends not to be especially generous because their wealth -was all on paper. there was an entire spread on the topic here, when i -first moved to FL.
Rockefeller didn't start spending money until very late in life-- I think all asshole robber barons are poor philanthropists early on because they are so focused on turning their existing money into money that they don't want to lose the capital and control of their enterprises that converting the stock into philanthropy may require.
There is probably some sense that because Gates made his money not in any delusion of the wonders of competition but explicitly with a vision of government-protected copyright monopoly as the key to serving consumers -- much as Rockefeller disdained the competition of wildcatters in his day -- that Gates is less enraptured with all the cyberlibertarian cant.
I worked for years criticizing Microsoft but I never bought the idea that "competition" was the magic alternative; I just thought that government regulation of monopoly standards was better than corporate control of those same standards. That debate with Microsoft is very different from the cyberlibertarian belief in the magic of markets in standards as the key. Cut out his self-interest and I suspect that Gates would probably believe that, given the choice, he would think the government monopoly made more sense than the libertarian free-for-all.
-- Nathan Newman
kelley