berkshire hathaway

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett recently made a joint appearance at Columbia University.  The two monopolists were embraced rather than pilloried:

Sitting facing each other in an auditorium filled with nearly 1,000 cheering people at a CNBC-sponsored event at Columbia University in New York, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Microsoft founder Bill Gates fielded questions from Columbia Business School students on the recession, investing and what’s the next Microsoft.

And you know how late-imperial ruling classes get decrepit, and become unable to acknowledge, let alone redress, their objective problems?  Here are your top two “free market” geniuses’ remarks on where they see us standing in history:

Buffett:

The financial panic is behind us….I did not worry about the overall survival of our economy.

Gates:

We proved that we can make mistakes. But the fundamentals of the system, a marketplace-driven system where we invest in education and a great infrastructure for the long-term, that’s continued….Capitalism is great.

See?  This has been merely a “financial panic,” not a huge recession, not a normal and predictable result of the radical mal-distribution of wealth under corporate capitalism, not the onset of Great Depression III, not a harbinger of Peak Everything, not a wake-up call in a make-it-or-break-it century.

Yes, mistakes were made, even though nobody expects a capitalist ever to make one, do they?

Take it from Bill and Warren:  The future looks bright for this great system of ever-expanding resource consumption and behavioral manipulation!