Dear Bill Gates: How to Save the Poor through Capitalism

So it seems that Bill Gates gave a speech at the World Economic Forum, and also an interview with the Wall Street Journal talking about something he calls “creative capitalism”. The video is here:

Perhaps this is proof that great wealth leads to great ignorance?

We don’t need a “new type of capitalism” to help the poor. We need simply to implement capitalism in those countries. Three simple steps to success:

1. Allow private property.
2. Establish the rule of law.
3. Eliminate corruption.

Voila! Capitalism saves the poor.

Virtually every single country with a deep poverty problem is lacking one or more or all of the above three. Where private property rights do not exist — particularly to land — as in parts of Africa and South America, there is no incentive to work. Where the rule of law doesn’t exist, contracts mean nothing, property is defensible only by force, and you get not capitalism, but gangsterism. Where corruption — whether by money, or by tribalism, or by connection-ism — runs rampant, it isn’t what you can do, but who you know that matters. And that retards capitalism.

So rather than spending millions of your dollars on trying to figure out some “technological” solution to the problem of poverty, use the money to fund a Microsoft Mercenary Military to take out the world’s dictators, establish private property and the rule of law, and see how that works out for ya.

-TS