It’s an interesting thought experiment. My take is that he probably could have done so, but he would have done it differently (consider Putin’s financial shenanigans for an example of “differently” - he spreads his wealth around between trusted cronies).
You seem to be assuming that if you take away the means, then the end is thwarted. You must surely be familiar enough with criminal justice to know that it just doesn’t work out like that. Consider the UK’s ridiculous knife laws - they’re hard to explain in a short paragraph, but the upshot is that if you’re “caught with” a knife of any kind (not necessarily one clearly designed for assault) then the onus is upon you to prove that you had only innocent intent. This doesn’t stop people stabbing each other; if people want to do that, they’ll find a way. Since knives have genuinely benign uses, the trick is to ensure that fewer people are inclined to go around stabbing people; the problem is not knives per se. You could make a similar argument for money, which can be used in good ways or bad ways regardless of the amounts involved.
In this particular case, how would you have stopped Gates amassing wealth and power? I cannot think of any practical political/economic policy - other than outrageously draconian ones that would cause widespread poverty - that could have prevented it happening. “Taxes” is not the answer.
Wow, they raised $4M in a couple of weeks? At least 100,000 people must have chipped in. So there’s another “fringe minority” for Trudeau to demonize.
I think this is one of those moments to roll out one of my favourite English words: “poltroon”. What a dickless little loser that guy is. If you aspire to be a dictator, you have to stand on balconies and deliver spittle-flecked rants.
Personally, I reckon he has mommy issues.
I notice the UK media are pretending they were on the Side Of The People all along, instead of - as they actually were - taking shitloads of money from the government to run carefully-crafted propaganda campaigns. See also @Jojo’s link:
I reckon they can tell which way the wind is blowing.
Germany doing what Germany does:
If you mean stopped him altogether, I wouldn’t have. It’s not either-or.
Tax is one example of a check/balance. Anti-trust laws are another. Disclosure and conflict of interest laws (with teeth) would be another.
Would it have been better somehow if there hadn’t even been an anti-trust case against Gates back in the day? If he and all those like him had been left to do their thing for decades without any state intervention at all? Or better yet, for centuries, leaving Standard Oil untouched? If the answer is no, that means some intervention is good, which even the most hardcore libertarians grudgingly concede if you go at them about it long enough. Every enterprise needs to be kept on a leash of some kind.
Yet if you advocate for minimal intervention – the longest possible leash, always, under all circumstances – once they get big enough they basically ignore the intervention, and you get a situation like we have now, with a handful of zillionaires doing to the world exactly what they’re doing now. My point is not that they should never have been allowed outside but that their leashes are too long. Less intervention (longer leashes) would make it even worse.
Don’t intervene enough in the business of the zillionaires, and they end up intervening massively in our lives (whether they do it openly or through proxies).
It’s not the first time. Have a look through old JP Thread posts and you’ll be less shocked.
Interesting contrast. It’s the same story, but DW still has some people willing to call out bullshit.
The government of New Zealand has been increasingly questioned over its COVID policies that force even returning citizens to spend 10 days in quarantine hotels run by the military. The requirement has created a backlog of thousands of people who want to return home.
“I am writing this because I believe in transparency and I believe that we as a country are better than this. [Prime Minister] Jacinda Ardern is better than this,” Bellis wrote, explaining that she sent 59 documents to New Zealand authorities before her application for an emergency return was rejected.
That was a close one. Their conscience almost made the give up 25 million. On second thoughts let’s hang onto that money 
Funck sake…25 million for those two lol.
BBC News - Harry and Meghan reveal Spotify Covid row concerns
She wants to get back to NZ and have the kid so she ratcheted up the publicity. That’s her right and she should be able to return. However Afghanistan was not her only option for sure. And Afghanistan does NOT treat unmarried mothers with dignity or any women or girls with dignity really . She is allowing them to use her. Shame on her.
Interview from today:
Then what would have been the payback for intervening? You seem to be arguing for intervention for its own sake. There must be a point to it - some identifiable result Y of doing X to billionaires. If you were the overlord of the universe, what specifically do you think could have been “done to” Bill Gates (or Microsoft), with what net-positive result?
But we already have all of those things, and yet we are where we are. Much has been disclosed about COVID, and nobody cares (it seems to have done nothing except provide ammunition for the conspiracy-theory wars). Tax doesn’t really check or balance anything - it just allows governments to inflict harm instead of corporations or individuals. Consider the quantity of tax money spent on propaganda, bribery, and draconian enforcement of “mitigation” rules during the last two years.
I honestly couldn’t say. If you’re referring to the case over Internet Explorer, I think it was much ado about nothing. I think the lawyers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of software (there’s no hard distinction between an OS and application software, and bundling applications with an OS or with hardware has been a popular strategy since computers were invented). More importantly, IE was shit and most people were just replacing it with the Mozilla browser of their own accord.
Antitrust laws haven’t prevented corporations from taking over the world; it’s just compelled them to spend more money on legal advice in order to achieve what they want.
I’m only familiar with the vague outlines of that story, so I wouldn’t like to make any authoritative judgement. Again, though, I suspect that it ultimately made no difference, because the world runs on oil. Which entity produces that oil is largely irrelevant - the negative consequences flow from the entire complex edifice of Big Oil and the downstream consumers, not any single cog in the machine, however large. Standard Oil would have almost certainly fragmented and mutated under its own weight, at some point.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but it occurred to me that Big Ag could be destroyed by small producers if those producers conspired to sell produce at a loss for six months or so. Meat and wheat producers run on such slim profit margins and depend so heavily on debt-funded plant that they’d fall to pieces almost instantly. Their land and assets would be auctioned off by banks and it would be possible to fix the appalling damage that they’ve done to the environment and people’s health. Anti-trust laws would prevent such a thing from occurring. That may be one reason why it hasn’t occured.
I personally believe in two principles: people ought to be left unmolested as far as possible; and the law should apply equally to everyone, however rich or poor. If undesirable things are happening, then the ideal scenario is to find a way of fixing them that does not involve putting people on leashes. Keeping the conversation roughly on-topic: consider this global push to get everybody vaccinated against everything. It isn’t Bill Gates driving that. There are several shadowy figures and organisations which are the prime movers, most of them State actors or funded by tax revenue. Gates has just hitched himself to a fashionable bandwagon, perhaps because he seeks power, influence and fame for its own sake. He may not actually care how that power/influence/fame is achieved. If that bandwagon had been something different - I dunno, a global reforestation programme, say - he might well have hitched himself to that instead. Gates is doing what he’s doing because other people have enabled him to do so, not precisely because he is rich.
People who remain very pro-Taiwan independence, as well as highly critical of China and the CCP (at least outwardly), yet remain simultaneously quick to censor anything that has the faintest whiff of exposing/condemning any of the pandemic policies and measures of government, might benefit from a short history course, even if from Wikipedia 
"During the martial law period the KMT, as an authoritarian state, exercised strict control of publication. Distribution of political manifestos and documents other than those from the KMT, Chinese Youth Party and China Democratic Socialist Party, were banned and publications advocating either democracy or Taiwan independence were banned…
… It was then decided to start book-ban to control the thinking of the people…Publications were strictly managed by the Taiwan Garrison Command and regulated by the Publication Control Act (出版物管制辦法) during the martial law era. Books that bore the name of Karl Marx were suppressed, as well as works by other authors whose names began with an “M,” such as Max Weber and Mark Twain, because in Mandarin their first names sounded similar to Marx. While this has become a joke today, it was a real manifestation of the thought control at the time.
Universities became a hotbed for communist study groups and the KMT recognized that university campuses were places of open ideas and thought and would hire student informants in classes to inform the Garrison Command of any students discussing issues that may be seen as a threat to the KMT. Some illegal communist publications remained in the archives and back shelves of some University libraries and the books would bear a stamp declaring the book and its content as an order of arrest.
The publishing ban also affected teaching materials for modern Chinese literature and foreign literature. Renowned Chinese writers, such as Lu Xun, Ba Jin and Lao She were banned, and the law extended to foreign literature they translated, such as those by Ivan Turgenev, Emily Brontë or Émile Zola. Li Ao, a famous political activist in Taiwan, nationalist, and intellectual, had over 96 books banned from sale.
Writer Bo Yang was jailed for eight years for his translation of the cartoon Popeye because the translation was interpreted as a criticism of leader Chiang Kai-shek and in June 1952 the student of national Taiwan University of archeology Ch’iu Yen-Liang was arrested by the Garrison command of KMT and sentenced to six years imprisonment for alleged membership of a marxist study group.
“Only those who lived through the martial law era know how important freedom and democracy are,” said Lee Shiao-feng [zh], a professor of history at Shih Hsin University.
Lee knew first-hand what life was like during the martial law era. One of Lee’s books, The Confession of a Defector (叛徒的告白), was banned by the authorities on the grounds that it “sabotaged the credibility of the government,” “instigated dissension between the government and the people,” “violated the basic national policy,” “confused public opinion” and “damaged popular sentiments.”
Sounds really familiar.
IMO this explains the strange inversion in demographics when you look at Taiwan’s vaccine stats: the youngest people are at 98%, and the oldest are around 60%. It seems to be popular on FM to mock the oldies as a bunch of superstitious idiots, but I’ve met enough of them to suggest that a good fraction of them still have their wits about them and aren’t buying the BS for a very good reason: they remember stuff.
Who the hell is listening to them? That’s the bigger WTF.