Now comes this from the confused mind of Bill Gates: Recently, Newsweek listed Gates as the world’s richest man, ($50 billion). In response, Gates said, “I wish I wasn’t. There is nothing good that comes out of that.”
           
Nothing good comes from being successful and rich? I’ll bet his legions of employees would be unhappy to hear that. Apparently Gates fails to understand that it is only through success and money that he is able to hire them. How would his wife and family feel to learn that Bill Gates finds nothing good in their comfortable lifestyle or the special opportunities he can now provide to his children?

The world, of course, would be a very different place without Bill Gates’s software creations. Most of us would be much harder pressed to go about our daily routines without them. Of course, none of them would be possible if Bill Gates hadn’t been successful and therefore rich, in order to pay for the development of his ideas. But according to him, nothing good has come out of any of it.

What Bill Gates has failed to understand is the true nature of money. He sees it as an evil to be controlled by some self-appointed moral authority. Money, of course, is simply the means by which we measure and reward success. As Ayn Rand so clearly put it, “Money is a is a tool of exchange that can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them… Money is made possible only by men who produce.”  There is nothing evil about it. The evil comes from those who loot from
those who create. It is simply a sign of moral depravity to loath such a result of honest effort. The only substitute for the free exchange of money among producers is the muzzle of a gun.

Bill Gates is certainly the modern socialist businessman. Rather than standing strong in defense of the system that allowed his success, he feels guilty about his wealth. Perhaps he would be much happier if
he were just another government employee working in his cubicle, carrying his lunch pail, shoulders hunched, frown permanently on his brow, joyless, oppressed, nothing special.

I’m sure that if he truly wanted to turn his entire company and all of his assets over to the government and let it run his company, the government would be more than happy to accommodate him so he could live out his days, guiltless and plain.

The only problem for the rest of us is that once the government consumes yet another piece of the free-market system, there will soon be a severe shortage of computer software.        

Tom DeWeese is president of the American Policy Center and editor
of The DeWeese Report. E-mail: apcmail@americanpolicy.org.