[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Managing Editor, Redmond Weissenberger]
The abundance of “rich-hating” in today’s Western culture has reached disgusting levels. Wealth is no longer seen as a sign of virtue and hard work but as a symbol of exploitation. For all his problems (wishing to “run” a country being at the top of the list), Mitt Romney was right when 
he said there exists a mindset of “victimology”. No matter what brilliant entrepreneurs bring to the market, they are demonized simply because they earn much more money than the average Joe. This has lead to a growing sect of businessmen who find it necessary to tell the public that not only do they not support the system that brought them immense wealth, but they support government regulation to make things more equitable.
The latest example is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. In a recent speech, he called for increased government funding for malaria vaccines. Capitalism, he says, has failed to address this concern despite many still suffering from the disease. Yet governments have been stealing and redistributing money for decades on humanitarian efforts. Certainly there have been results, but the success has been limited due to government’s bureaucratic, inefficient nature. What Gates 
doesn’t mention is that the free market already helped to eliminate malaria in the West through the development of DDT. But thanks to “watermelon” environmentalists, the Third World is spared from this miracle pesticide only to pay with their lives.
Usually when businessmen opine over the failures of the free market, they are asking for regulations that shut out competitors. Think of Washington’s relationship with JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. But in this case, Gates dismisses the market process in favor of intervention because of his own misunderstanding. Instead of allowing people to spend their money as they see fit, he would rather enlist the state to do his bidding. It’s a shame to see a man who revolutionized the commercial world fall prey to the idea of government benevolence. Without capital formation, there are no resources to dedicate to malaria research. Wealth has to be created by private individuals before it can be spent. The state only confiscates savings and gives the dough to political cronies. Government-funded research does more to spread statist propaganda than advance science.
Here is a message for Bill Gates: The marketplace gave you your fortune. If it wasn’t for the free choices of people, you would not be in a position to lecture us on the failings of capitalism. Cognitive dissonance is no excuse to advocate state plundering. Remember that next time you decide to criticize free and open markets for what you think it means.
Redmond Weissenberger is the Managing Editor of The Dollar Vigilante and the Founding Director of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada, the centre for the study of the Austrian School of Economics within Canada.
Redmond founded the LvMIC in 2010 to address the lack of knowledge about the true cause of our booms and busts of the last 100 years and the need for sound money and sound economics to be applied to the Canadian and global economy.
.jpg)
I really don't get the redistributionistas and their hatred and envy. That's all that socialism-communism is on the local level: envy with a gunman on the payroll.
It's the familiar refrain from the Occupy Wall Street crowd who go to Target to buy their camping gear and then post on Facebook with their iPads about how they're fighting capitalism.
What they probably mean is that they really hate the "big" corporations who provide all that neat stuff while supposedly gunning down indigenous people somewhere (Hint: that's what the government did, not businesses). And granted, corporate personhood and license is pure state-spawned evil, much like "intellectual property". A corporation essentially lets you do a lot of awful, deceitful things and then blame the imaginary friend the government made up for you.
While corporations are horrible sins created by the state, business itself is a virtue. It's the pursuit of profit that brings higher quality of life. People keep forgetting that while coporations are state-abetted and willing to use the state to limit competition or get favorable legislation passed, corporations themselves do not have actual armies. For the most part, they have all that nasty, awful money because they made people happy and those happy people gave them money in return.
You have to let people get as wealthy as the market will let them. If that means outrageous wealth, then so be it. That's the only way to a richer society with a higher standard of living for all. And it's the only way to have a moral society at all. There is no point at which it is justified to start stealing someone's wealth, no matter how great it gets. As long as it was the result of voluntary exchange, then it doesn't matter if it offends some envious hippies.
When you try to punish and prevent wealth accumulation, first you get the stagnation and misery of Soviet Russia. Eventually you get the Flintstones. Minus the cute talking dinosaurs and laugh track.
But such a huge percentage of Americans hate profits so much that businessmen have to apologize for making it. And even the people who are good at making money and accumulating capital have to pretend they'd rather have most of it stolen at gunpoint. Hard to believe that this is the America we find ourselves in. That's why we are offering a possibly permanent way out, for both you and your assets.
Regards,
Gary Gibson
Editor, The Dollar Vigilante
