Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Feb 14, 2017, 09:19AM

Gates vs. Trump

Not that much difference.

Billg.jpg?ixlib=rails 2.1

If there's one thing Donald Trump's election proves, it's that Americans love rich people. The wealthy, we're convinced, are industrious and innovative. Success indicates virtue and intelligence. Government is inefficient, wasteful, and dumb. Give it over to the efficient, virtuous plutocrats, like Trump, Michael Bloomberg, or Bill Gates.

Lumping Gates in with Trump may seem like a stretch. Gates is not a conspiracy theory hate-monger. He's mostly known now as a philanthropist who uses his wealth to finance worthy causes like malaria eradication and school reform. Trump inherited some of his wealth and his businesses are mostly scams and failures; he likes to call himself a billionaire, but the best estimates are that he's millions of dollars in debt. Gates created one of the most iconic companies of the Internet age, and he's legitimately the richest man in the world. Trump has failed upwards, to the detriment of everyone; Gates has put his smarts and talent to work for us all. Gates for president!

The differences between Gates and Trump are less stark when you look closer, though. Like Trump, Gates is not a self-made man. His father, William H. Gates, founded the prestigious law firm Preston Gates & Ellis and was wealthy and a well-known philanthropist. Like Trump, Gates started life with substantial privilege, connections, and money. He didn't ascend into the upper class by virtue of his brilliance. He was born there.

The success of Microsoft itself was due as much to shady corporate practices as to innovation or smarts. Microsoft leveraged its market size to force consumers to use its browsers and systems, and to block competitors. It had to settle a lawsuit with the US government, and it lost an EU ruling, forcing it to divulge information to competitors and hitting it with the largest fine in EU history to that point. In popular consciousness, Gates the philanthropist has largely eclipsed Gates the bloated predatory monopolist forcing you to use shitty software. But without the monopolist, the philanthropist wouldn't exist.

Gates' original foray into school reform pushed smaller schools as the solution to grade school and high school achievement. It wasn't, but Gates threw so much money around that to get grants, schools dutifully reduced school sizes, resulting in bureaucratic bloat and an expensive re-jiggering when Gates realized the strategy was failing. Gates' next bright idea was focused around teacher bonuses, an initiative that also didn't work.

Gates is not an expert in schooling; he's an expert in tech and manipulating markets to benefit himself. Yet, he spends billions on education funding, pushing US schools to chase after whatever new idea happens to strike his fancy, with little public oversight or voter input.

Gates isn’t an evil person. Unlike Trump, Gates wants to do good. He uses his enormous resources to try to help people, and his contributions to ending malaria have certainly saved many lives. But plutocracy isn't bad because plutocrats are all uniformly horrible, soulless assholes like Trump. It’s bad because those with no particular merit or legitimacy except for the accident of having been born into money are able to exercise sweeping power over the lives, and for that matter the deaths, of everyone else.

Gates found himself in a position where he could first manipulate software choices and then demand that people make useless and expensive changes to their school systems. Whether Gates is a good or a bad man is irrelevant; what matters is that he has enormous, unearned power to do good or ill. The country that enables Bill Gates will inevitably enable its share of Donald Trumps. Inequality breeds evil, even when the powerful exhibit occasional shreds of decency.

Discussion
  • Gates has no college degree, is world's richest man, but isn't a self-made man. Falls into the category of "things clueless leftists say."

    Responses to this comment
  • You don't need a college degree when your daddy is fabulously wealthy. Gates' dad was a famous philanthropist, started a wildly successful and influential law firm.// Credentialing is a lot less important when you're father's name can open all the doors you need.

    Responses to this comment
  • Yes, I'm sure that all the college dropout had to do was drop his dad's name to all those PC-makers Gates and Allen signed contracts with to develop operating systems for on pay-in-advance terms, allowing them to hire additional programmers and grow their business. The tech business is all about personal connections, not about being able to add value to a firm's products.

    Responses to this comment
  • All sons of rich white men had the skills to develop the operating systems that IBM, Ricoh etc required to run the machines they were manufacturring, didn't you know that? He merely had to call them and identity himself as such to get those contracts.

    Responses to this comment
  • All businesses are about personal connections.// All sons of rich white men have more opportunities to gain skills, power, and resources than other people do.// I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the preposterous knee jerk defensiveness. All hail Bill Gates lest we have to admit the meritocracy isn't real.// True believers in capitalism are a credulous lot.

    Responses to this comment
  • So what businesses have you been involved in?

    Responses to this comment
  • No business experience, yet you understand business.

    Responses to this comment
  • I'm a self-employed businessperson, fwiw.// You only need to be vaguely sentient and talk to people to know how important personal connections are in any profession. Of course, ideological commitment to licking the boots of the wealthy can blind you, I guess....

    Responses to this comment
  • It's curious that someone so opposed to identity politics as yourself Beck felt the need to start babbling about whiteness. I didn't talk about race or gender in the piece. It's about class. You're doing a good job of illustrating how racial and gender solidarity leads many white men to conflate their fortunes with those of the wealthy, though.

    Responses to this comment
  • With all due respect Noah, I think you're overrating how easily a wealthy relative's name can open doors. If the product is crap, or if one can't return on investment, doors will close. Or, as we saw with Trump's financial woes in the early 1990's, there will be limits put on what one can do.//I do like the point about plutocracy being an unelected position. During the Bush years, I thought we were sliding into a pre-French Revolution-like aristocracy, or perhaps a corporate fiefdom. I think the Trump administration is making good on that.

    Responses to this comment
  • I see, then your personal connections must be what allow you to get published. Explains a lot.

    Responses to this comment
  • Before Gates got into the position of being a market manipulator, he made a damn-good product which people liked and bought. So your chain of events is erroneous. If you wish to discuss about unearned income, you should focus on land-rent & the FIRE sector, not on the real economy (which actually produces tangible output).

    Responses to this comment
  • So, anyone who is rich has "enormous, unearned power to do good or ill"? What about poor terrorists? Don't they have a similar power? What about the child molester? What about the nun who beats her students and turns a blind eye towards pedophilia? What about the police officer who helps an individual while off-duty or the soldier who risks life and limb to save civilians? Seems to me that being a good person versus a bad person is not only relevant but a crucial point that you so wantonly ignore.

    Responses to this comment

Register or Login to leave a comment