Bill Gates the Marxist
Yes, Bill Gates, one of the people who gained the most from liberty and Capitalism, is a Marxist 😡
If you ever had any doubts about it, this meeting he held with far left activists in the UK should clear up any doubts:
Bill Gates: ‘Vaccines are a miracle. It’s mind-blowing somebody could say the opposite’
The title is kind of ironic, given that what he calls "vaccines", the disastrous mRNA products, are literally "mind-blowing" - they cause severe neurological damage in addition to cardiovascular failure and a host of other issues that are documented in more than 1000 scientific studies.
We see people dying left and right - babies, toddlers, teenagers, athletes and healthy middle-age adults, including celebrities, who were completely healthy before they got injected with his "vaccines". He seems to have zero awareness of what is going on in the world.
There would be much to say about this article. I'll focus on the question by Anand Giridharadas (Author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World):
"Bill, do you agree with the notion that every billionaire is a policy failure?"
He actually thinks that governments - the most evil organizations on the planet, the ones responsible for every war, for every genocide and for impoverishing people since they exist - should prevent individuals from becoming wealthy with some arbitrary limit.
If we were to usher in a wealth tax that over time cut your fortune down to just below $1bn, do you think you would still be able to have a happy life
He does not understand that really wealthy people use only a ridiculously small amount of their own wealth for personal consumption. Their wealth consists mostly in shares that represent businesses they invested in. By taking their wealth, the government would directly defund those businesses.
and do you agree that the resulting investments we’d be able to make – not to mention the cutting back of your power over public life as an end in itself – would make the world better off?"
Governments DO NOT INVEST! Whatever capital governments get their hands on is destroyed through mismanagement and corruption. Governments do not lack money to do whatever they claim they are doing.
When 3G was introduced, the German government auctioned off 3 licences to carriers who had to pay about 70 billion Euros for the privilege of spending tens of billions on their mobile phone networks.
The cost of those licences was so high that they had to cut corners and often opted to install more powerful antennas rather than more antennas with lower emissions, which caused health issues for people living just next to those antennas. Absolutely no one could explain what happened with that government windfall gain of 70 billion Euros, an amount that was paid for by German mobile phone users through much higher communication costs.
Take the old socialist government of Brazil - in the 1990s, an investigative reporter calculated that based on the amount of money government officially spent on helping homeless children in Rio, they could all live in 5 star hotels. Instead, all of them still were homeless and hungry. So where did all that money go? He was murdered shortly after asking that question.
The smaller government is, the more local it is and the more control people have over it, the better. That's why Switzerland works better than France, Germany, Russia, China or the US Federal Government - big entities are all corrupt to the bone, inevitably.
If the US were as centralized as France, it would be even worse than California everywhere - with tiny islands of ultra-rich people surrounded by an ocean of homeless people, massive crime waves, power blackouts and a crumbling education and healthcare system, problems the government somehow fails to solve despite very high taxes.
The only interesting part here is the question about Bill Gates' own influence on "public life". But that's not a problem because "private wealth is bad", but because Bill Gates is a Marxist. If he was a classical liberal, economically educated, then he would say the same as me and his influence would be immensely beneficial.
Instead, he said this:
Well, I certainly think we can have much more progressive tax rates.
More robbery...
And governments need more resources
No, they don't! They have way more money than they "need" and use it to actively cause harm.
including for things like foreign aid
"Foreign aid" should not even exist! It's just a way for politicians to channel money from tax payers in the West into the pockets of dictators in 3rd world countries, with huge kickbacks to the politicians who sent the money!
We've just had the perfect illustration with billions that were sent to Ukraine channeled back to the Democrats via FTX.
"Foreign aid" has had disastrous effects on the receiving countries. It keeps the most corrupt in power and prevents any serious economic development.
Here is just one example to illustrate the fact that bad government schools are not caused by a lack of money (I have many more in my archives):
PS 106 Is N.Y.C.’s Worst School: Why Didn’t Parents Step In?
https://newsone.com/2836615/ps-106-far-rockaway/?omcamp=EMC-CVNL
Because the school is in a low-income area, it is allocated $2.9 million plus extra funding, but no one has seen where the money is going.
Every effort to spend more government money to "fix" bad schools failed miserably.
In Switzerland, education is handled at the level of the cantons (which are very much like US states). The OECD PISA test provided some excellent insights. The Swiss canton that spends the most, per pupil, is Geneva. The one that spends the least is the bilingual canton of Fribourg.
In the PISA test, Geneva had the absolute worst results, while Fribourg had the best!
With government, less is more!
I don’t necessarily agree, I think… you know, some money that’s spent on philanthropy can have an even greater impact than the average tax expenditure.
If it was actual philanthropy, that works well. It doesn't work when "philanthropy" is used as a cover to gain political power and push Marxist ideology. Unfortunately, every major charity foundation has been captured by people just like Bill Gates - ultra-rich heirs who adopted Marxist views to deal with their feelings of guilt.
A little reminder: Bill Gates did not grow up poor. His parents were rich enough to donate an entire building to Stanford University! His mother was friends with the CEO of IBM. So Bill Gates is the prototype of the rich heir who feels guilty about being rich. To see how that works, read the book "Guilt, Blame and Politics":
https://www.amazon.com/Guilt-Blame-Politics-Allan-Levite/dp/0966694309/ref=sr_1_1
But it is a surprise to me that tax rates in rich countries are not more progressive.
What in the world is he talking about? Taxation in western countries is already horrendous! In most EU countries, governments control more than 60% of their economy - with disastrous results.
I mean, only the US really has an estate tax,
That's factually wrong. Most countries have what would properly be called a "death tax" or "inheritance tax".
which of all the taxes is the most just
There is no such thing as a "just tax". All taxation is robbery.
Inheritance tax mostly has the effect of destroying family businesses or forcing kids out of their parents' homes, because they cannot afford to pay the tax.
Here in high-tax Geneva, real estate prices exploded due to the many ultra-rich foreigners who moved here. Modest homes are suddenly worth millions. The inheritance tax is calculated based on the market value of such properties. So when kids have to pay 40% of the value of their parents' home, they cannot keep the place where they grew up in. The money they retain will not be enough to buy a new house, so middle class families are forced to either move out of the region or live in an apartment. Their former family home will be transformed into an apartment building or sold to wealthy investors who will build a luxury villa instead - and most of the time, they don't even live there.
I live in such a villa district that is gradually transformed into ugly apartment buildings, while the area near the lake is all palaces that are empty, most of the time. So estate taxes are good for the ueber wealthy, who can easily protect their wealth with all sorts of methods, bad for the middle class.
because it stops sort of aristocratic wealth, and these kind of dynastic fortunes at least get reduced pretty substantially.
That's obviously not how it works. The only real problem with inheritance are people like Bill Gates. If one could properly educate rich heirs that they do not need to feel any guilt about their good fortune and instead should concentrate on economically useful investments, the world would be a much better place.
So why doesn’t Europe have an estate tax? A real estate tax? They don’t.
Bill Gates is simply wrong. Ridiculously wrong!
In France, even real estate belonging to foreigners is taxes 50% when the owners die, so the inheritance tax is not even tied to being a citizen or a resident. When the French government imposed this rule - which violates previous tax agreements with, among others, Switzerland - i.e. that taxation is based on a person's country of residence - tens of thousands of Swiss people who owned properties in France sold them off - mostly to investment businesses that are not affected by inheritance taxes.
And I guess democracies have chosen not to do that.
"Democracies" decide nothing. Politicians and bureaucrats make the rules. Elections have virtually no effect. People like Bill Gates control the media and buy politicians.
The only country that makes use of direct democracy is Switzerland and Swiss people rejected heavy wealth taxes because they are not stupid. The people also rejected minimum wage laws, a CO2 tax and a single payer healthcare system. That's why we still have the highest wages on the planet...
So, yes, rich people can pay more.
This is the argument of the robber: how much can I get from my victim. He utterly fails to explain why people should pay more!
I don’t think banning anybody being worth a billion dollars, that’s the right way to go about it.
Like all the rich heirs like him, he feels guilty about being rich, but does not want to give up his own wealth. He wants other people to be forced to pay more in taxes. It's virtue-signaling at the expense of others.
And it’s important to remember that, if you really want to grow social programmes, just do the numbers: you won’t be able to get that just from taxing the very rich.
Not a single "social program" ever did any good. The "war on poverty" has led to more poverty, just as the "war on drugs" led to more and much worse drugs.
What DOES work is the reduction of taxation and regulations. Just a brief summary of the effects of Trump's moderate tax and substantial regulatory reductions:
You can get more from the very rich, but if you really want governments to spend more
I most definitely do NOT want government to spend more!
that’s too narrow a tax base for most things people would like to add, the social programmes people would like. So, it’s a numbers game.
This is the only true thing he said. Taking the wealth of "the rich" will not pay for government expenses. about 80% of all the tax income stems from taxing the income of the top 20% of all tax earners. Fewer than 0.5% of the highest earners pays for about 40 - 42% of all government tax income. So its the most productive employees - those who earn high salaries - who pay the most.
I’ve always pushed for more progressive taxation.
That makes him either ignorant or evil!
Clearly, he never bothered to look at the outcome of various policies.
He should have read more Thomas Sowell than Marx.
That’s been on my website, and we’ll see: can the UK have more progressive taxes? Can any of the European countries? They don’t at this point."
This guy lives in lala land... 🤡
"Taxing the rich" has led to the complete destruction of the French industrial base.
A few years ago, I met a French industrialist in Geneva, 3rd generation of a family that had created numerous factories throughout France. Taxation & labor regulations had forced him to abandon France, although he loved France. He had managed to maintain only 10% of their activities in France. The rest had been moved to countries like Romania. He himself had moved to Switzerland. If he hadn't done that, his business would have been wiped out.
Did this ultra-heavy taxation help the people of France? Only in keeping them poor!
The French ambassador to Switzerland just complained that too many French healthcare worker took jobs in Switzerland, where a simple nurse can earn the same as a business director in France (the average income of the top 5% wage earners in France is about 6600 Euros).
Marxists know that people will flee high tax countries. That's why they want a world government.
That would simply mean that one could no longer flee their "progressive" (confiscatory) taxation. Thus the entire world would be impoverished. It would all be like the USSR.
How is it possible that people like Bill Gates are incapable of understanding such things?