The Northern Review

On NPR this morning I heard a fluff piece at the end of thank you to Bill and Melinda Gates for their support of something or other. The piece went something like the Gates’ support each person’s rught to advance himself.

How nice I thought. How darn right nice. But then I remembered. Bill Gates has done just about everything he could to capture market share of an operating system, an office suite, an internet front end, email client and so on. He has driven hundreds of companies out of the market with his success. It has been claimed over and over he has not violated anti-trust laws and copyrights and so on.

Each person has a right to advance himself but watch there are some of us who want more, want what you want, want as much as we can get. We are the juggernaut of competition. We will eat you up.

So what does one make of this? As a culture, we have high tolerance, even reverence for the guy who can give away lots of money even if it was rather ruthlessly accumulated.

We like such people so much we will even build football stadia at public expense for their privately owned professional football teams. Brower v. State, 137 Wn.2d 44 (1998).

Seems us baboozie would sell our souls for a pit of spectacle, power and rich guy worship.