Billionaires Have Their Uses
Thank heavens there wasn’t a wealth tax on Bill Gates.
by The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
Let us now speak in favor of billionaires. We refer specifically to Bill Gates, who was recently asked what good his fortune could do in this pandemic. “Governments will eventually come up with lots of money,” he replied on a TV show. “But they don’t know where to direct it. They can’t move as quickly.”
The Microsoft mogul turned philanthropist said his “early money can accelerate things” in developing a vaccine against Covid-19. “For example, of all the vaccine constructs, the seven most promising of those, even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven,” he added.
Rather than waiting to find out which vaccines are most effective and safe, and then building factories, Mr. Gates wants to ensure that the manufacturing capacity is ready to go immediately.
“It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in the situation we’re in, where there’s trillions of dollars” at risk is worth it, he said. “And normal government procurement processes, and understanding which are the right seven, in a few months those may kick in. But our foundation, we can get that bootstrapped and get it going and save months.”
Bravo. Mr. Gates’s money could save millions of lives and help restart the global economy if his manufacturing bet pays off. This effort comes in addition to the billions Mr. Gates already has spent fighting other infectious diseases, and the $125 million he announced in March to tackle Covid-19.
Mr. Gates’s plans are a rebuttal to proposals for confiscatory tax policy that punish wealth creation. If wealth taxes of the kind proposed by Elizabeth Warren and now entertained by the Financial Times were in place in the 1980s, Mr. Gates’s roughly $100 billion fortune might be a tenth of that. And it’s unlikely he’d have the capacity to act this boldly.
Private actors—business and nonprofits—will play a major role in easing the economic and medical pain of the virus. The Gates Foundation and other philanthropies can often move faster than government, which suffers from political interference and turf issues as we’ve seen with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failure on coronavirus testing.
Once the virus is conquered—and it will be—the biggest risk will be the political campaign to expand government control over far more of American economic life. Society will be better off because Mr. Gates is the one spending his billions rather than having to turn them over to the ministrations of the U.S. Congress.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/billion...es-11586301710
