I know I'm a bit late to the game here but...
Not necessarily. How many thousands of people did he employ? How many of them were freely educated in public schools? How much money did his company make from the internet which was developed through public subsidies? How much does he benefit from police protection for his private wealth compared to you and I? Or copyright and patent protection for his business? Or the benefits of allowing H1B workers into the country. I think 5000x is probably an understatement.
First you need to read more critically. My assertion was about Bill Gates
PERSONALLY NOT MSFT. Gates does NOT have thousands of personal employees, Gates does not personally have anything to do w/ H1B employees or MSFT patents. You have completely misunderstood the argument.
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Switching to *YOUR* example of MSFT *CORPORATION*.
Most companies, like MSFT use public services (water, sewer, fire police, ...) and they also pay a very hefty tax for these. The amount is usually disproportionately high to the actual value since these public systems all have "deadbeat" users. People who pay little or no actual local tax but use water, sewer, fire & police. You should look up your local or nearby city fire codes for commercial building and also the tax codes for business. You are in for a surprise - businesses underwrite public services to a great extent.
The US very early created the modern patent system specifically to recognize ownership rights for invention.. Copyright recognized controlling ownership for certain kinds of work also. You cannot seriously claim then, that the patent or copyright holder now owes us a social cost for recognizing his rights !!! There are many many things wrong with the US and international copyright & IP systems but your contention, that a patent/copyright holder owes society for not stealing his work is just dim. You are wrong in another way. The government does NOT "protect" or defend your patent or copyrights claims/work. YOU have to go to court on your own dime. ((I've been there and it's ugly & expensive)). Fileing a patent is roughly like filing a land-deed for your home. It does not mean the police will help assert your rights, but only that you have evidence of ownership recognized by the Govt in court.
We can't discuss the H1B visa problem on this thread as it would take us too far off-topic. H1B system was vastly abused by both business and the Visa holders IMO. The whole program was a crock IMO. I'm unaware of MSFTs involvement, but MSFT is just an example of a successful company. Pick another if you like.
EDUCATION:
You seem unaware that employment is just a simple contract. When you go to the grocer and buy a piece of fish you shouldn't expect indirect costs to appear. Yes the fishermen needed nets and fuel and the processor needed labor and the refrigeration but those are all part of the embedded costs. The contractual exchange is that you get a bit pf fish and the venor gets the agreed to amount of cash without encumbrances either way. If you decide to work for MSFT or some other company it's much the same . You provide perhaps software development services in exchenge for the agreed-to wages and benefits. MSFT is NOT buying you an education. They rationally should not care if you were self-taught, home-schooled, went to public schools or private schools - the ONLY thing they are buying are sw development services in exchange for wages and benefits.
If there was some new extraordinary tax imposed on hiring a publicly educated person that cost would directly decrease the salary of those individuals. This is necessary to stay competitive. In a sense MSFT is already paying for the education as an indirect cost of employment in the wages.
Your erroneous thinking about education costs has two sources. You ignore that education is a general good with value outside of the workplace. You assume that education is roughly equivalent to "trade school". The stay-at-home parent who never holds a job (do they still exist?) still benefit greatly from a decent education. Actually the children of these educated caretakers benefit greatly from that education too. Without education the electoral process becomes less sane and stable. The second error is that you have a "Wage-slave's" view of what employment is about. It is an exchange of value. Both parties benefit or else the voluntary exchange never takes place. But is is also a careful balance of value on both sides of the ledger. You can't make up some new cost on business and imagine it won't appear as lower wages or else higher product costs. The higher product costs are prohibited by competition (See GM for example).
Similarly the City of Redmond is free to Tax the heck out of MSFT and when/if MSFT leaves town they are hosed. And MSFT like all businesses is required to flee to the most advantageous business environment in order to remain competitive.
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So in your world view how does society pay for the education of the guy who chooses to live in a cabin, write non-commercial poetry and live by begging ? Who pays for police and fire for the indigent (who actually use a great deal of this service).
Balancing these social costs on the back of companies that bring vast benefits to an area, that may never have existed given the extra burden, and that can, at a modest cost, move elsewhere is just stupid and incomprehensible.
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You have a very fanciful but wrong history of the internet. My first univerisity (private btw) was on the APRANET for most of my undergrad time there 1969-1974. DARPA charged universities and private sites for access and a very hefty fee too. The only sense in which ARPANET is a predecessor to the internet is that it formed an early model of networking and developed a few protocols, but few remain in use. ARPANET in it's state of the mid-1970s was useless for industry or home use.
The lasting legacy of ARPANET to modern networking was in the form of the TCP/IP protocol developed with DARPA funding BUT heavily influenced by CYCLADES a French research network schema. There were other competing schemes in the 1970s, primarily supported for telephony.
You also ignore that practical modern networking was mostly PRIVATELY developed. Xerox-Parc's ethernet coax, which was standardized by IEEE(private) into the modern media including. Vint Cerf's rfcs were replaced with the IEFT(private) organizations network standards. If you read through the RFCs you'sll see nearly all were contributions from private companies, Sun, Xerox, IBM, BoltBeranek&Newman, DEC, etc.
So if your argument is that the Federal government should have patented their TCP/IP invention, I agree; however since there were a plethora of alternatives the price would either be remarkably low or else ppl would have used another protocol.
Of course unless you are really ignorant you'll realize that all companies using such a government patents would pass all the cost along to their customers - who are roughly the same ppl who invested their tax dollars into the original development..
Your other error is in assuming that MSFTs fortunes were founded on the internet. Actually MSFT was very slow to adopt networking in their products, ignoring it until the late 1980s. Apple by contrast was using a PRIVATELY developed appletalk protocol later adapted to 802 media (so for a long time Apple was not using any publicly developed network product). Biil Gate was very wealthy long before they ever attached Windoze to a network (late 1980s IIRC).
Now let's put that shoe on the other foot. MSFT software (tho' I personally hate it) has made the operation of many parts of government vastly more efficient. Ppl get emails via MSFT proprietary protocols, displaying MSFT .doc proprietary encoded documents in MSFT proprietary GUI. MSFT funds a lot of projects that use up money but fail. Perhaps the government should pay something extra for their use of all the proprietary MSFT goodness that they didn't contribute to. Perhaps Bill need a new Mazzerati and a vacation in Italy due to his unhappy childhood, so perhaps they should pay for that too ?
Again this is contract lunacy. The MSFT product is sold at competitive price for cash. Thats's the contract and trying to include all sorts of secondary issues makes a muddle of commerce and runs counter to the purpose and utility of money.
I still suspect your attitude stems from the looney-left view that if anyone has made money that it somehow involves depriving others of that same money (economic hokum). Then the corollary lefty-thought that if there is wealth, since it it ill-gotten we have the right to take it . Outside of progressive circles these thoughts are called envy and theft.
