Bill Gates Wants Socialist Medicine to Combat Coronavirus — Without the Socialists
Bill Gates says the private sector is ill-prepared to respond to pandemics and that governments need to ratchet up their spending by the billions and take charge. Too bad he’s still opposing the democratic-socialist movements that could do just that.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation chairman Bill Gates speaks during 2019 New Economy Forum at China Center for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE) on November 21, 2019 in Beijing, China. Hou Yu / China News Service / VCG via Getty
The world’s second-richest man, Bill Gates, must have a cartoon angel on his left shoulder, like those 1930s cherubs advising Donald Duck or Pluto, who every so often makes him blurt out arguments about the limits of the free market. This week, it’s the COVID-19 coronavirus that has attracted the attention of his social-democratic better angel.
A few years ago, the topic was the clean transition, and how, in the energy sector, there are areas of research that offer profound public good but insufficient financial return. Echoing the arguments about the state as a primary catalyst for innovation of left-wing economist Mariana Mazzucato, Gates said that government should step up and ratchet not just spending in this field, but also the taxation necessary to do so.
This past week, the shoulder angel seems to be in charge once again, this time with respect to an essay by Gates on the multiple market failures relating to COVID-19, and pandemics more broadly, that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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