This is fine, but any claims to inconsistency or surprise simply don’t make sense.
Entrepreneurs are looking for huge payoffs. They want locked-in mass markets. Microsoft will make exponentially more money convincing the UN that poor people need computers and should subsidize their distribution than they will selling their product to free people in a market without any other adjectives.
I realize I could go into Microsoft’s own record here and show that they are as likely to advocate free market capitalism as a Detroit union leader is to advocate the unilateral end to all trade restrictions. But why pretend that Microsoft is so exceptional. Read tech business news. When isn’t some company trying to make their living by taking some other company to court over intellectual property. The world of global mega-corporations is a world of piracy and viking raids. It is a world of government contracts. It is a world where the Chines government is always right and if that means we turn over dissidents, then that is just the cost of doing business. Except that the large businesses don’t even view it as a cost–it is just a freebie that lets them win favor.
I doubt very much that Gates credits the free market with any part of his success. He saw opportunities and he took them. Depending on who you read, some number of these opportunities were chances to break rules as much as prosper by playing by them.
If anything, I suspect Gates simply thinks that the thing itself, the computer and software industry, was simply the result of the inevitable process of progress. It’s not about capitalism. It’s not about freedom (beyond all the personal freedoms that statists want subsidized). It is about Microsoft as the true messiah who brings us into the new era.
But, whatever is going on, opportunism is not capitalism. If an opportunist appreciates a free market, it is only to the extent that he is in a position to use it. But the free market limits the opportunity of the ambitious as much as it empowers. So the opportunist moves on without inconsistency to appreciate whatever else might give him his chance to increase power.
Hat Tip: Bobber’s Del.icio.us links
Reading Techdirt is starting to rub off on you 😉
Opportunism abounds! This kind of “Entrepreneurial Spirit” has bitten me several times! Most recently a domain search engine I use(d) to check on the availability of names started reserving the names to re-sell them to me at a higher price (pretty obvious by the date they were registered, and they’re pretty unique names). Careful who you use!Let me know if I can recommend some safe possibilities, I’d be more than glad to.
What capitalism (meaning the right to own property and capital) is is the protection that all entrepreneurs have against the selfish sinful tendencies of other entrepreneurs to unjustly relieve us of our own profits, either by law or theft.
If it weren’t for the freedom that Gates had in the beginning from unjust confiscatory taxes, and just his neighbor taking from his what was his, Gates would not have the capital resources he has.
Capitalism is not the right for you to take advantage of others for your benefit. Properly understood, it is the privilege of enriching others and being rewarded for so doing. It is interesting that we are told that it is better to give than receive, but then we find out that those who give the most to others are rewarded the most for doing so.