“When you’re rich, they think you really know,” sings Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
That’s the only rationale for listening to the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, whine about the evils of capitalism. In an interview with The Atlantic, Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said that free markets could not solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. Only socialism, he said, could save us.
Gates explained:
There’s no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems. Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.
At the moment, there’s no incentive for innovators to investigate mythical green energy at length because carbon-based fuels are more reliable, cheaper, and more efficient than anything the green energy market has to offer. However, it is also true that government regulation has not driven down emissions – in fact, government artificially lowering oil prices drove emissions up, resulting in the government corrective of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. CAFE standards apply to a low number of vehicles – new buyers who drive a lot. CAFE also lowers the weight of vehicles, making them less safe on the roads compared to older vehicles, and therefore cutting against buying new vehicles. CAFE has actually cost lives by pushing efficiency standards that cannot be met without compromising the safety of vehicles, according to the Heritage Foundation.
Rising gas prices drive up fuel standards, not government regulations.
Which is why Gates wants a carbon tax. But a carbon tax means destroying the economy in favor of a theory of climate change that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny: the climate is affected by greenhouse gases, but we don’t know to what extent, and we don’t know how measures taken in response would alleviate that problem. Meanwhile, billions of people suffer when carbon fuels – the single greatest scientific breakthrough in fighting world poverty – become more expensive.
The fact is that Gates is rich enough that he and his friends could donate their time and money to R&D that could produce market-friendly technologies, if they so desired. But Gates is too selfish for that. When he says “There’s no fortune to be made,” he’s lying: there is, if your product is good enough. He didn’t say the same about Microsoft. And it’s not true of green energy, either – the fracking industry has made billions seeking natural gas, which is far more environmentally friendly than coal, for example. The environment gets better in capitalistic nations, not communist ones, as anyone who takes a look at the Chinese can tell you.
And Gates gets even more dishonest:
Since World War II, US-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area. The private sector is in general inept. The climate problem has to be solved in the rich countries. China and the US and Europe have to solve CO2 emissions, and when they do, hopefully they’ll make it cheap enough for everyone else.
This is insanity. The private sector is not “in general inept.” The government is. The private sector has created virtually the entire information age, just as the private sector created the industrial age. Government misallocates resources, because its decisions are simply not accountable to market forces. Most of the major problems in the world have been solved not by government but by the private sector; most of the problems have been caused by government.
Gates is hardly the first major American entrepreneur to preach the gospel of government control of the economy. At one point, Thomas Edison wanted to be dictator of the American economy – in December 1911, he stated, “A lawyer cannot draw a law covering the complicated conditions of modern industry. What is wanted is some person familiar with the selling and buying, the technical as well as the financial end of all industries, to devise some generic scheme that business can work on.” As his model, he used proto-fascist Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm.
Gates follows the same model: get rich off capitalism, then whine about it. The good news: capitalism can even make political idiots like Bill Gates useful to the rest of us.