The (billionaires’) case against billionaires

Turns out, we live in a society.

The downsides of a world with billionaires in it are well-rehearsed: billionaires can convert their vast wealth to power, and use that power to turn their whims and pet theories into policy failures that affect millions — or even billions — of people.

Take Bill Gates. Forget all the conspiracy theories about Gates and vaccines — it’s bizarre that people bother to make up those fairy-tales when the truth is so much worse. Gates has an absolute ideological commitment to the idea that profit-based production is the most efficient way to produce and allocate goods.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

It’s what prompted him to declare war on free/open software, what caused his foundation to block patent waivers for AIDS drugs in sub-Saharan Africa and other poor nations, and it’s what led him to strong-arm the Oxford university team to kill its plan to release its vaccine into the public domain, opting instead to license it to Astrazeneca.

Gates’s foundation is the key force in fighting against covid vaccine copyright and patent waivers at the WTO, insisting that the world’s poorest billions should rely on charitable donations from rich countries, waiting for vaccines until the…