I just found this out about Michael Bloomberg: He is a "self made billionare"

[Sloumeau]

89. in2herbs, that was a great post.

Due to my parents both being teachers, I ended up being pretty intelligent. They had my siblings and I learning to read when we were one-year-olds.

Over my lifetime, I have acquired a very solid education, and I have amassed quite a number of skills. However, I would not be where I am today without literally tens of thousands of people, and I can prove it. For about five years, I worked technical support for an Internet company. On average, I talked to 60 people a day, 300 people a week, 1200 people a month, 14,400 people a year. I helped all of those people, but all of those people, paying their bills, helped pay my salary. So, in five years, that's about 72,000 people who helped me, and who I helped.

My education and my skills are also the product of all of the people who wrote, edited, manufactured, and shipped all of the books that I have read. My skills are the product of all of the people that have worked on all of the documentaries I have seen. They are the product of all of the people who created all of the computers that I have worked on, and of all of the people who created all of the programming languages that I have learned. I know as much as I do because of the thousands of different people that I have written to on the internet and who have written me back. I know so much because of the thousands of people who created and maintain the internet that allows me to Google any question hat I want. There are probably more than 100,000 people who are responsible for all of the things that I know today.

So, when someone tries to tell me that someone is a self-made man, that they did it all by themselves, I just want to laugh. Someone just mentioned Bill Gates to me and all of the things that he did. I have read two biographies on Bill Gates, and lots of articles on him. I know exactly how he made his money, and it would not have been possible for him to make all of that money without thousands of people writing all of the versions of MS-DOS and Windows, without thousands of people building IBM PC's and compatibles, and without all of the thousands of other people writing programs that could run on Dos and Windows. If there is anyone in the history of the world who did no make his fortune all by himself it is Bill Gates, and I bet you Bill Gates would be the first person to agree with that.

I have some problems with how Bill Gates did things, but I also give him credit for some other things. Bill Gates gave out stock options like they were candy for a long time, and because of that, a lot of great hard-working people got rich working at Microsoft. For things like that, I give him praise. For the truly awful way that Microsoft worked to destroy competitors like Intuit and Borland, I give him a lot of brickbats. As I wrote earlier, there are degrees of evil.

Bill Gates should not be as rich as he is, and if there were stronger labor laws and stronger unions, he would not be. So, if he only had $1 billion for every $2 billion that he has right now, he would still be perfectly fine. I don't worry about the billionaires having less. I worry about the people who cannot afford to eat. I worry about the people who cannot afford their medicine.

We live in a society where Republicans try to tell us that the rich are the job creators, when, in reality, whenever the economy crashes, it always gets restored by the government giving jobs to regular people. Republicans are in love with Adam Smith economics and Supply-Side Economics, when, in actuality, the U.S. became a superpower based on Keynesian Economics, and it was Keynesian economics that gave us the U.S. recovery from the Great Depression, that gave us Bill Clinton's economy, and that gave us Barack Obama's Recovery. The U.S. always comes back to Keynesian economics because everything else fails--sooner or later.

Because of this, I want to laugh when someone says that I am a Marxist. In reality, I am actually an FDR capitalist who loves Keynes and thinks that Adam Smith still had things to learn when he died in 1790. Wanting strong unions and strong labor laws does not send a nation into Soviet Union-style Communism/Socialism or even the current Chinese Communist/Socialist/Capitalist blend. It *prevents* countries from that by helping the people at the bottom another way--so that they don't have to resort to Communist/Socialist blends.

I always try to assume that whoever I am chatting with is really intelligent. I can generally find brilliance in just about anyone if I really look. It is only very rarely that I cannot find it. When that happens, that is OK too. I generally enjoy spending time with people of any intellect level unless they are rude.

When people write great posts to me, as you did, I sometimes like to write long posts like this. When someone is rude to me, why should I waste my time with them? They do not seem to be enjoying themselves, so why should I prolong the conversation when odds are noone will enjoy themselves? Thanks again for the great post, and have a great day.