Idiot Savants waste their billions
Inside Liberty Watch Today - July 10, 2006

The mainstream press is gushing over Warren Buffett's $31 billion contribution to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Even Pat Choate and Fred Weinberg at The Penny Press ladled on the praise. Choate figures Buffett's wealth combined with Gates' wealth and know how will solve "diseases and problems that have been beyond governments and their bureaucracies." Weinberg believes "Gates is exactly the kind of guy who will get results with the money at whatever problem they look at solving."

According to Weinberg, "Gates says they are looking at problems that the free market cannot or will not solve." On the Charlie Rose show recently, the leftist Buffett announced; "the market system has not worked in terms of poor people."

What these two guys prove is that no economics knowledge is required to get rich. It is free market capitalism that can lift people out of poverty. Period. Doug Casey in his International Speculator newsletter goes as far as calling Gates and Buffet "Idiot Savants."

"My guess is that despite his intelligence, expertise, and generally affable, self-deprecating manner, Buffett is profoundly misanthropic," Casey writes. "Like Gates, Buffett has a classic anti-capitalistic, limousine-liberal mentality towards money…"

And in response to Gates' old hackneyed and politically correct statement: 
"We really owe it to society to give back," Casey correctly points out: "No, you idiot savant, society-which is largely composed of nonentities who produce no more than they need to survive personally (if that)-owes you a huge debt for your work with computers."

Buffett unfortunately learned nothing from his father Howard, a Nebraska Congressman that was the Ron Paul of his day. Buffett has criticized California's Prop-13, which limits property taxes in that state. He says he pays more in property tax on his modest home in Omaha than he pays on his mansion in California. But instead of chastising Nebraska government for being greedy, he thinks Prop-13 should be overturned.

The Gates Foundation focuses on world health and on improving U.S. libraries and high schools. Ironically, one disease that the Foundation focuses on is malaria. But as Lew Rockwell writes; "We know how people contract it [malaria]: from mosquitoes. We know how to control it: kill the carrier mosquitoes. And we know what kills them: DDT." Government has banned the cure for malaria. Malaria isn't a free market failure. It's government failure, as is public education. And one would think a computer genius could see that future libraries will be on everyone's desktop.

What Buffett and Gates are doing with their billions has far reaching ramifications, according to Casey. "Discomfort with wealth is among the many reasons the Orient will overwhelm the West in the next few generations," Casey explains. "Buffett's and Gates' grandchildren may be working as maids and houseboys for the Chinese. A rich Chinese wouldn't dream of leaving his money to a charity, to be dissipated by the do-gooders, world-improvers, socialites and socialists who almost invariably infest their boards."

Gates and Buffett should continue to do what they do best-make money and accumulate capital. As Casey notes: "The accumulation of capital, no matter who owns it, adds to the demand for everyone's labor, and so enriches everyone who can get out of bed."

If these billionaires want to truly help the poor and the sick, and insist on donating their vast fortunes, they should support the teaching of Austrian (free market) economics. What the world needs now, are free markets and unfettered capitalism, Gates and Buffett should use their billions to spread that message.

Doug French, Liberty Watch Columnist


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