Bill Gates Is Bad for Humanity

By “maximising” lives, the billionaire philanthropist is making ours worse.

The typical question to ask about Bill Gates is: what happens when the boss from hell decides to save the world? A new book suggests there is a deeper and more interesting one: what does Bill Gates want from human life?

William Henry Gates III, who was born in 1955 in the dead centre of the baby boom to a wealthy Seattle lawyer and a banking heiress, is among the vanishingly small group of people who can not only imagine a different future for humanity, but has a reasonable chance of realising it. He is able to do so because of the laws of his native US. The most important is the tax code, which allows Gates to transfer large amounts of money to his philanthropic foundation’s fund, from which he can spend on purposes of his own devising.

Needless to say, most of us do not enjoy the same privilege. We take for granted that the fiscal clause of the social contract means that we abdicate powers of state spending to elected officials and laws. Gates, by contrast, has a free hand to build a quasi-state of his own. In his book Empire, Incorporated, Philip J Stern writes about chartered entities that predate nations, but continue to exist inside of them. His main examples are universities such as Harvard and Yale, which continue to enjoy a level of self-government that other entities do not. (Harvard boasts that it is, formally speaking, “the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere”.)