Stefan Molyneux responds to Bill Gates recent comments asserting that the government is more efficient than the private sector.“Yes, the government will be somewhat inept,” Gates said. “But the private sector is in general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them.”Bill Gates Thinks It’s Time to Fix Capitalismhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molley from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
I like Bill Gates.
I do.
I do.
I know some people don't.
I do.
I actually saw him speak in my previous incarnation as a software entrepreneur.
I was down in Las Vegas having a great time sitting in on a Bill Gates speech about the future of the Internet back in the day.
And I like the guy.
Okay.
But!
And sometimes, like Kim Kardashian, it's a big but.
There is this challenge that people have when they're smart in one area to think that they're smart in all areas.
And it's really not the case.
And you really have to be careful when you go on talking about things as big as medical research and the origins of the internet and government funding and taxation and public policy.
Ugh!
It's so easy to go awry, particularly if you seem to be doing it without even a basic shred of moral principles.
So he gave an interview, Bill Gates gave an interview recently at The Atlantic.
And I'm just going to read some quotes and tell you some of my thoughts, and then you can see if you want to invest in my software empire, which actually doesn't exist, but I think I might be able to add something to it.
So he said, It's phenomenal.
We spend 30 billion dollars a year of government money and the private sector goes out and comes up with new drugs.
It's an industry that the U.S. is by far the leader in, creating wonderful jobs, great miracle cures.
And that is working super, super well, apparently in the Valley.
But we spend more than all other countries put together.
And the U.S. lead in health technologies, including drugs, is gigantic.
Just like the U.S. lead in digital technologies is gigantic.
Okay, so...
This is an argument I think he's putting forward that the government needs to spend a whole bunch more money on R&D. That's his sort of basic argument.
And he says, we spend $30 billion a year of government money, and the private sector goes out and comes up with new drugs.
First of all, if the private sector is receiving government money, it's not really the private sector anymore.
You know, that actually technically is called fascism when you have private ownership of corporations for public money pouring into them.
And of course, big business really likes that.
The government to do R&D. Like, he's a big business guy, was in big business for a long time.
Big business really, really likes for the government to do R&D because they get to privatize the profits, but they get to socialize the costs of R&D. Now, it's true that the United States is staggeringly high in medical research spending and significant portions of it come from the private sector.
Here's some examples.
The top five US hospitals conduct more clinical trials than every single hospital in any other single developed country.
Just the top five in the U.S., more clinical trials in all the hospitals than any other single developed countries.
Since the 1970s, about the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined.
I read this from an article with the source below.
In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the Nobel Prize.
Most of the recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.
Well, why is that?
Well, because the United States still has some vestiges of a profit motive In the healthcare industry.
And therefore, it is to the interest of, say, insurance companies to pay for medical research to reduce medical costs.
It's in the interest of hospitals that are profit-driven to develop ways to keep people healthier or reduce the cost and so on.
In the same way that it wasn't the...
It wasn't the police force that came up with anti-lock on cars, right?
Anti-lock technology on cars, of course, police force just receiving government money, whether they catch criminals or not, whereas the car companies don't, like, want you to not have your car stolen, so they have much more of an incentive.
Now, the U.S. used to account for more than three quarters of the world's research spending, In healthcare, which is truly staggering.
And the U.S. has profited from the vestiges of the profit system in the U.S. healthcare enormously.
But the share has gone down in recent years, down to about 45%.
So it's gone from 75% of world spending down to 45%.
Now, the results of all that spending is that in Germany, breast cancer mortality is 52% higher in Germany than in the United States.
In the United Kingdom, you're 88% more likely to die of breast cancer in the UK than you are in the US. Prostate cancer mortality 604% higher in the UK. 457% higher in Norway.
The mortality rate for colorectal cancer on British men and women is about 40% higher.
And they eat a lot of fried food.
Even in cancer, breast cancer mortality 9% higher.
Prostate cancer mortality 184% higher in Canada.
Colon cancer mortality among men is about 10% higher than in the United States, which is why when I had the fell disease of cancer, I fled the Canadian healthcare system to get operated on in the United States.
People say, well, let's just socialize medicine, and that means cutting off the giant spigot of American, exceptional American medical research that is currently funding most progress around the world.
But if you talk to Germans or Canadians or Australians, people in New Zealand or the British, nearly 70, more than 70% of the adults there say their health system either needs fundamental change or complete rebuilding.
So they really, really don't like it.
And the health outcomes in America are pretty clear.
Twice as many American seniors with below median income self-report excellent health compared to Canadian seniors.
And that's important.
It's 11.7% in America, 5.8% in Canada.
White Canadian young adults with below median incomes are 20% more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as fair or poor.
So the U.S. healthcare system has a lot to recommend it.
And what's happened is the government put a lot of money into research and then there was cuts in government funding.
And that's the main reason why the funding or the investment in healthcare technology and research in America is diminishing.
But what's happened is as the government money has pulled back, as is always the case, you take a giant rock out of a stream, the water doesn't just keep going around, it rushes in.
As the share of public money has gone down, the share of private money has gone up, of course, and people still want to be healthy and want good cures and so on.
So, in 1994, it was only 46% of spending in medical research was private, and that's increased to 58% in 2012.
So, not too bad.
Now, to continue, Bill Gates says, in the case of the digital technologies, the path back to government R&D is a bit more complex because nowadays most of the R&D has moved to the private sector.
But the original internet comes from the government.
The original chip foundry stuff comes from the government.
And even today, there's some government money taking on some of the more advanced things and making sure that universities have the knowledge base.
That maintains that lead.
So I'd say the overall record for the United States on government R&D is very, very good.
Now, here's where madness lies.
I mean, real, crazy, megalomaniacal, out-of-reality, psychotic madness.
Yes, it's a strong claim.
But the tens of billions of dollars that he's talking about, hey, we just spend it.
No, the government takes it by force from people.
The government prints it into existence, thus driving up inflation and the prices of goods, which is very hard for people on fixed incomes, particularly the poor.
The government borrows it, thus selling the next generation into Bankster Chinese-style debt slavery where they basically would be coolies laboring away in the spice mines of Kessel for the rest of their natural days.
It's not a very benevolent thing for the government just to go and spend money.
We should always be aware that it is.
It comes into existence through force or through fraud, through taxation or through the printing of money.
So that's kind of important to begin with.
The second thing is the real challenge when looking at society is not to see the obvious benefits of certain approaches that have been taken, but to look at the hidden costs.
And the hidden costs are hard to To see, right?
I used the example before.
The government spends a huge amount of money, creates 500 jobs, and everyone says, hey, 500 jobs, that's fantastic.
And all the people who get those 500 jobs love the program, and the government bureaucrats who buy votes, the politicians who buy votes, and the bureaucrats who have jobs love that stuff.
A-OK. 500.
It's number one.
Benefit.
However, of course, the millions and millions and millions of dollars that the government pulled out of the economy in order to create those 500 jobs, Is a whole bunch of jobs that otherwise would have been created.
Because you put the money in the bank, the bank lends the money to someone who's going to start a business or puts it out in a line of credit, or it goes into the stock market, which fosters growth in some business.
So when you create 500 jobs, that's a very visible benefit.
And the people who get those jobs really like it and make a lot of noise and there's ribbon-cutting campaigns and so on.
However, there's no little economic funeral processions for all the jobs that weren't created because the government took that money out of the economy, either now or in the future through debt.
And so someone who would have got a job If the government hadn't taken that money to create jobs, that person who would have got the job doesn't even know that he would have got the job because the job never came into existence.
This is why it's very tough to think about things intelligently when it comes to the economy, when it comes to particularly government intervention in the economy.
And the reason I say it's completely insane for Bill Gates to say the overall record for the United States on government R&D is very, very good is that in order to make that assessment, He would have to have, I'm pretty sure he doesn't, maybe Windows 11,
he would have to have the ability to look down the tunnel, kaleidoscopic tunnel of all of the alternative universes wherein the government didn't take that money away from the private sector and the private sector used it to create X, Y, or Z. Industry or innovation or invention or whatever, it doesn't really matter.
So in order to say...
The record for the United States on government R&D is very, very good.
Compared to what?
Compared to what?
It's the fundamental question of philosophy.
There's an old story about a philosophy professor.
Someone comes up and he says to the philosophy professor, how's your wife?
And the professor says, compared to what?
It's a fine question.
What are you comparing this to?
You can't possibly know.
Let's say the government took $100 billion out of the economy and pushed it into some R&D area.
You can't possibly know what that $100 billion might have been put to work for, what it might have achieved, what jobs it might have achieved, what breakthroughs it might have achieved, what health, happiness, relaxation, consumerism it might have satisfied in the absence of that.
So you can't possibly compare a government program, government force to anything else whatsoever.
It's sort of like saying, well, the mafia goes and shakes down all of these businesses along the main street in Little Italy, and then what they do is they hold a big party with bouncy castles.
And that's really good, you see, because they hire a lot of people.
The caterers are happy.
The people who deliver the wine are happy.
The people who deliver the bouncy castles are happy.
The people who blow up the helium balloons are happy.
The people who put out the finger food, you get the point.
Lots of happy people and say, well, look at that, but it's the money that was taken out.
Of the businesses along Main Street in Little Italy, they might have expanded, they might have grown, they might have bought new menu items, hired more waiters, they might have, who knows, right?
You can't ever compare the results of government force to anything.
Because you cannot look at all of the alternatives.
You'll never, ever know them.
And we hear a lot about this, you know, that, oh, you know, the Internet came out of the government and so on.
And it's true.
In fact, Department of Defense back in the day wanted to have a methodology for communicating that could survive nuclear war.
And so they created a decentralized shared system of information exchange, which languished for a long time until people began to transform it into the World Wide Web that we know now.
Okay, so we have the Internet now.
Partly as a result of government spending and the creation of the protocols of shared information transfer.
Okay.
But here's the problem.
Well, one of many problems, other than the moral problem that was done by force, here's the problem.
When the government puts the R&D into a particular area, spends money into a particular area, what happens is, think of it as a train track that is built halfway to a town.
Well, who knows if that's the best place for the train track?
Who knows if train track is the best answer?
But what happens is people say, well, the train track is half built.
We'll just finish the train track.
And what they do is they continue down the road that the government has started.
Who's to say that's the very best road?
It's impossible to say.
And the likelihood is it's not the best road.
Because the majority of things that people try fail.
The majority of businesses fail.
And we'll get to that in a sec when he talks about investment.
But the fact that the government starts something in a particular direction means that everybody just kind of goes down that direction.
You know, it's like water going down a carved channel.
It's like, oh, this is easier path or least resistance.
The R&D is already done.
But who knows whether the Internet is the very best way?
I mean, good heavens.
Imagine if it was a penny to send an email.
Well, how much of your life would you save by not having spam?
How many nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence would not be on the Internet?
If it was a penny in email, because that would render spam functionally impossible to make any profits on.
How many little old ladies wouldn't end up sending their life savings to Nigerian print scam wannabes?
What's the security like on the internet?
You know, the guy who first came up with the HTTP protocol has recently said, it's terrible, it's ridiculously insecure, we should totally scratch it and start again.
But of course, the train tracks have all been built, and so that's the society that you have.
That's the way that the internet goes.
So security is really bad and spam is a big problem.
I don't even know whether anonymity on the internet is always necessarily a great thing.
Should it be optional?
Should it be not?
I don't know because the government built it a certain way.
Everyone built on top of that and then everyone says, well, we wouldn't have all of this without the government.
It's like, you wouldn't.
That's true.
You'd have something different and I would imagine a heck of a lot better.
So this who knows is really, really, really important to understand.
It's like in the 1950s, the government borrowed all this money and just created the interstate highway system.
Again, partly out of fears of nuclear war and so on.
And so Americans dispersed like crazy.
Families disintegrated.
Communities disintegrated.
We got a car-based culture which put huge amounts of power into the lunatics in the Middle East and so on.
And now everyone's complaining about oil consumption and environmentalism and issues with CO2 and emissions.
Okay, but when the government borrowed all this money to build all these roads, it fundamentally changed American society.
These roads weren't profitable because they were built by the government, which means that no private industry wanted them.
And so now that there are all these free roads, yes, you are, quote, free, and you get all of this widely dispersed people commute, and now you have, you know, tens of thousands of people dying on the roads every year.
You've got people stuck in traffic going slowly insane as air supply plays over and over again, no matter which AM station you go to, but enough about my driving.
So we don't know.
Well, you see, without the government, we wouldn't have all these roads, and yeah, okay.
What would we have?
I don't know if you had turbans on the evening news, who knows, right?
So, now, Bill Gates also said, when I first got into this, I thought, how well does the Department of Energy spend its R&D budget?
And I was worried, gosh, if I'm going to be saying it should double its budget, if it turns out it's not very well spent, how am I going to feel about that?
But as I've really dug into it, the DARPA money is very well spent, and the basic science money is very well spent.
The government has these centers of excellence.
They should have twice as many of those things, and those things should get about four times as much money as they do.
Yes, the government will be...
Oh yeah, we'll do that a sec.
Bill, why four times?
Why not 40 times?
Why not 400 times?
Why four times and not five times?
Or three times?
Again, who knows?
The money is very well spent.
So the money that's forcibly taken from the population is very well spent.
How do you know?
How do you know?
Listen, take an analogy.
It's not that crazy an analogy.
So let's say I'm carrying around 500 bucks in cash and some guy sticks me up, takes the money, right?
And then he goes and spends it on stuff, right?
How can we say that money is very well spent?
It wasn't taken from me by choice.
So no matter what the guy does with it after that, it's not that great morally, right?
But how do we know?
How can we say, well, that guy spent it the very best possible way?
Compared to what?
Compared to how I would have spent it?
Well, nobody knows how I'm going to spend it because it got stolen by the thief who went and, you know, spent it on whatever, right?
So if somebody would come and say, well, it's true that the mean woman mugger took Steph's $500, but that money is very well spent and it's far better spent by that mugger than it would have been by what Steph would have blown it on, hookers and blow or whatever, right?
Of course, nobody knows what I would have spent the money on because it was taken from me.
And in the same way, This is R&D, people.
I mean, this is not the police, the law courts, the military, or even for small government people, stuff they think is necessary for the government to do.
This is R&D. And so taking money from people by force and saying, well, the government spends it much better on R&D, how could you possibly know that?
You don't know what these people would have spent that money on.
So, he says, yes, the government will be somewhat inept, but the private sector is in general inept.
How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly?
By far, most of them.
And it's just that every once in a while a Google or Microsoft comes out and some medium-scale successes too, and so the overall return is there, and so people keep giving them money.
So...
This is a problem.
He thinks that government investment is really great because private sector investment is much, much, much, much worse.
That makes no sense at all.
Even a six-year-old, I ran this past my daughter, even a six-year-old can understand this.
So what Mr.
Gates is saying is that people who have invested their own money Their own blood, sweat, and tears, their own sleepless nights, their own time not with girlfriends and family.
All those people are somehow going to be far less successful than some bureaucrat who basically is throwing a lawn dot at a bunch of binders figuring out what to fund.
Yeah, a lot that people invest in Doesn't go well.
That's because it's really hard to figure out what people want.
Plus, there's a shifting regulatory environment.
You never know what stupid trade deal is going to bring swarms of people in or out of the country, or swarms of goods in or out of the country.
Government keeps changing interest rates.
Government keeps changing the money supply.
Government keeps changing the tax code and all the regulations and the federal registry.
You name it.
So, yeah, a little complicated to do business in the modern world.
And you don't know, hey, I just perfected the ultimate rotary, what?
What, I got cell phones now?
Oh, come on!
Right?
Yeah, okay.
It's tough to come up with stuff that people want.
And I say this, I've been an entrepreneur.
I wrote code, and I co-founded a company.
We grew the company.
It did well.
It's hard.
I mean, it's a huge amount of work, and we were really invested in making it work.
So this idea that somehow incentives don't matter means that Bill Gates has no understanding of economics.
Because what he's saying is that the government can do much better than the private sector when it comes to investment.
Even though in the private sector, they're investing their own money, their own time, their own effort, their own energy, and so on.
And they may be left smoking in craters of debt if it doesn't work out.
But government bureaucrats who get paid whether or not they succeed or fail I'm going to do a much better job.
The question then is, well, what does it mean?
You know that something's failed if it goes out of business, like in the private sector.
How do you know if it's failed in the government?
How do you know?
There's no customers.
There's no stock price.
No profit and loss.
No volunteerism in the entire thing.
The money comes in through force.
How do you know?
Well, you maybe get binders saying, well, I think we did a good job here.
And you're like, oh, yeah.
Right?
Makes no sense at all.
So this idea, it's just madness.
And we'll get to what this really means from a business standpoint.
Because, Billy, Billy, Billy, the same entity, the entity that you're saying should take over more and more of this R&D. It's the same entity that is currently prosecuting the war on drugs.
It's the same entity that is pretending to educate inner city children.
It's the same entity that has spent decades trying to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.
It's the same entity that is mass spending the next generation into financial slavery and on and on and on and on.
This is the same entity that buys votes by printing money.
And then blames the free market for prices going up, right?
I mean, it's the same entity.
There's not this magical good government and magical bad government.
It's not like the government is like, you know, half-orc and half-elf.
You know, it's the same entity.
It's the same entity.
When Bill Gates first started doing the Gates Foundation and he went out to bring mosquitoes out to Africa and so on, He would go to these non-governmental agencies, a lot of whom were getting government money, and he'd say, okay, well, how's it going?
Give me your numbers, and they would have nothing.
And he'd be like, okay, you can't manage what you can't measure.
First, we've got to start keeping track of things.
We've got to start measuring things.
These were all things that were being done by the government.
Remember, the government is spending billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars every year to bring the third world out of poverty.
How's that been going, Africa?
I don't know.
It's the new colonialism.
So this is just some belief that there's a very, very different situation.
Um...
It's interesting because when Bill Gates was in charge of Microsoft, there were lots of incentives.
People got stock options, people got raises, they got fired if they did badly.
So he knows as a manager that people respond to incentives.
And the idea that you would give everyone the same pay in Microsoft no matter what kind of job they did, well, that would be financial suicide.
But somehow in the government, removing incentives makes things super efficient.
Well, it only looks efficient because they've got the printing press and the guns.
I mean, why don't you just take Microsoft and since the government's so really great at managing things and the government's so great at R&D, why don't you take Microsoft's entire R&D division and turn it over to the government?
Why don't you take the people who created the Surface or the Surface Book or the people who are coming up with the next version of Office or the people who are coming up with the next version of Windows, just hand them all over to the government.
Set them up within the government.
It would be fine, wouldn't it?
Not suggesting any of that, right?
Because, see, that would be against the profits of Microsoft.
Whereas getting the government to spend more on R&D means that people can fire their R&D departments and hope that the government's going to trickle down something.
And there's less competition.
Of course, when the government does it, then your R&D department doesn't have to be better than the guys across the hall.
Right?
Because you're all being taxed.
Nobody's got an R&D department.
It's really being done by the government.
So you just figure out whatever's going to trickle out of them.
And also, if bureaucrats are so great, if bureaucrats are just so fantastic at spending R&D wisely, why aren't they venture capitalists?
If they can choose better than venture capitalists, what...
R&D spending is going to be the most valuable to society.
Why on earth are they government bureaucrats?
Why don't they go out and make a trillion dollars a day as venture capitalists who can outperform the market itself?
I mean, the answer is because, of course, they can't.
And everybody knows that.
Unless you're a guy who wants to offload more of your business costs onto the general population.
From a recent Foundation study, because he talks about energy and all that, the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program distorts investments, incentives, and undermines competition.
In the case of the Section 1705 program, the result was to transfer billions of dollars from taxpayers to politically connected corporations.
Much of that money was simply wasted on projects that failed or remain incomplete.
It is likely that the net effect has been to reduce investment in innovative technologies that are able to compete in the marketplace.
Xunleit, X-U-N-L-I-G-H-T, Xunleit, bless you, a green energy company and a recipient of staggering amounts of government loans recently went bankrupt.
And it spent $100,000 on lobbying in 2008-2009 alone.
How much did the companies like Solyndra, Evergreen, Abound, Satcom, how much did they spend on lobbying?
Mr.
Gates?
Quite a lot.
And they went bankrupt as well.
The recipient of the largest Department of Energy loan spent close to $11 million on lobbying between 2007 and 2012.
Quite popular!
Among people who take lobbying money.
Bill Gates talks a lot about failed investments in the private sector, but where is the successful investment made by the government?
Where is the Microsoft of green funding?
Doesn't really seem to happen.
This is the same entity, and Bill Gates should know this better than everyone.
This is the same entity the government.
The Department of Justice hounded IBM for antitrust violations.
You're too big.
You're too successful.
People like you too much.
They're voluntarily giving you too much money.
Evil.
13 years they ground away at IBM. And this crippled IBM. It killed their innovation.
Talented people didn't want to work there because they're like, I've got a way of getting more market share.
And they're like, don't do that.
It'll piss off the government.
Same thing happened to Microsoft and same thing has been shattered around with Google as well, particularly in the European Union.
I mean, this antitrust stuff, there's no rules, there's no laws, you have no idea whether you're breaking the law or not, and they just, they come in and just grind you down and grind you down with these endless investigations, and it just drives away the talented people.
IBM certainly benefited from the fact that nobody wanted to work there while they were going through these endless investigations and ended up in other places like Microsoft and so on.
And this is the same entity that you want to be in charge of, everybody's healthcare research and tech research and so on.
Now, he also said, everyone likes to argue about how much the shale gas boom was driven by the private sector versus government.
There was some of both.
Nuclear, huge amount of government.
Hydropower, mind-blowingly government, because permitting those things, those big reservoirs and everything, you can't be a private sector guy betting that you're going to get permitted.
Permitted?
Permitted.
Anyway.
So this is what he's saying.
He's saying that hydropower, hydroelectric power, well, the government has just laid claim.
I think the federal government owns like a third of America, right?
So the government just lays arbitrary claim to property, which it's really not supposed to do.
Just lays arbitrary claim to property, and then the government can do it because you're not a private sector asking for the government's permission.
How can that possibly be considered a failure on the part of the free market or the private sector?
If the government can do it, because the government gives itself permission to do it, but it won't give the private sector permission, how is that possibly a failure of the private sector?
By the amount of mental contortions you have to go through to believe this stuff is just astounding.
He went on to say, Okay, so back when the government wasn't funding stuff, rich people funded it.
So what he's basically saying is, okay, see the government hires all the experts on nuclear energy, hides them away in military facilities, locks away their research so the Soviets can't get their hands on it, and somehow we're supposed to imagine that the free market magically failed to develop nuclear energy.
And so when it comes to hydropower, he even admits the government would get in the way of potential investors, but still somehow Market failure!
Market failure.
Hey, the moment I see a market somewhere in here, I'll stop thinking about failure.
Now, I guess my last sort of point with this, I appreciate your patience with this, it's very instructive.
And again, like the guy, smart guy, just, you know, a little bit of Mises, a little bit of Friedman, a little bit of...
I don't know.
Anyone.
That would be some...
Any Austrian economics, even just basic economics, Chicago school, you name it, anything.
Read a little.
Because Bill Gates is saying, well, see, the government is so much more effective than the private sector in these very complicated and difficult areas.
This is the same guy who set up the Gates Foundation with his wife, Melinda, as a charity.
Why would you do that if the government is so efficient and so effective?
First of all, why do you need a charity?
Because the government is already spending hundreds of billions of dollars on foreign aid every single year, which is pretty much the business of taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries so they can buy middle-income people, arm them well, and use them to oppress their own population.
So if the government is already spending all of this money in foreign aid, why on earth would Bill Gates feel the need to set up a charity?
It would make no sense at all.
Why not just take your huge fortune...
And give it to the government.
I mean, the guy's got, I don't know, a hundred and something billion dollars.
Just take all that money, give it over to the government.
Why would you set up a charity?
It makes no sense at all.
Because he recognizes that the government was doing a bad job.
He needs a charity so that he can do a better job.
But somehow, the area of R&D completely reverses itself.
You don't need incentives.
There's no corruption.
There's no lobbying problems.
There's never any malinvestment, or it's very rare.
I know that money's been spent really well because I looked at their spreadsheets, not at all of the other possible alternative universes where people might have kept their own goddamn money and spent it on things that they valued, you know, Like their children, or like starting a new business, or like getting a car wash and helping the car wash business.
Who knows?
This is the frustrating thing about a lot of public intellectuals.
When you're smart, when you're very successful, when you're very respected, you kind of have a particular responsibility to not be woefully clueless about the subject that you're talking about, to not say things that are so obviously contradictory to common to not say things that are so obviously contradictory to common sense, to your own
I mean, nobody's asking you to get a PhD in Austrian economics, but just, you know, look in the mirror and say, hey, I really hated the way government was doing foreign aid, so I'm going to start a charity.
And then I'm going to go and praise how efficient government is at everything and how better it is at being efficient than the free market or private charity or rich people investing in stuff.
I don't know how people get through the day with this level of cognitive dissonance.
I mean, it truly is astounding.
So...
That's all I'm saying.
You know, there's stuff in this show that I'm not particularly well-versed in.
You know, I try to read up on it and so on, but I'm constantly reeling in experts and saying, you talk to them because you know a lot better about it than I do.
And this is the basic thing.
You want to always be aware of something called the Don and Kruger effect, which is you have to be good at something to know when someone else is good at it.
Like, if you don't know programming and someone sends you a whole bunch of code to read, you don't know if it's good or bad.
You have to know how to program in order to know.
And the better you are, the more likely you are to appreciate really good programming when you see it.
The same thing is true of just about every field of human endeavor.
Somebody hands me a big paper on physics that's really advanced, I'm like...
Nice font.
I think those squiggles are pretty.
Hey, look, I can draw a TIE fighter flying by if I flip through the pages.
That's what I'm doing with it.
So when it comes to how should resources be applied in a society, which is a fundamental question of economics, two principles of economics, number one.
People respond to incentives, which is not present in government R&D. Number two, all resources are finite.
All human desires are infinite.
And how those resources get allocated relative to human desires is a fundamental question of economics.
This is not at all addressed by Mr.
Gates.
And he doesn't even have an amateur's knowledge of the field, which is really upsetting and unsettling because not only is this thing disseminated, but everyone's going, wow, that Bill Gates is really smart.
He says, nobody's saying, does this make any sense?
Which means that despite the fact that Bill Gates is woefully uninformed and uncritical of basic logic, basic common sense, his own experience in the free market, his own experience with government, and what he's done with his whole foundation.
But there's lots of people out there who don't have any clue how uninformed he is, which...
It's a kind of human hellhole avoided thinking that keeps me up at night.
But that's why I do this show, to hopefully bring some sunlight to these very, very dark corners.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
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