The recent special report of Time magazine  featured Bill Gates’s essay on creative capitalism. It’s worth reading, rolling out in short, readable paragraphs, with specific examples  throughout history,and ending with a mild exhortation to get on board with his mission to help solve poverty and hunger through market incentives. Mr. Gates writes about a late-night drinking session with Bono–Bono the singer–and watching Bono call CEOS  around the world to enlist them in a program to divert a share of profits for good causes. We all should have such fun.

 I read the essay with an eye to finding some fatuousness or another that surely a rich man out of touch with economic reality would concoct. Don’t we all sort of hope the rich get egg on their faces when they choose to lecture the rest of us? Frankly, I didn’t find much to scoff at or quibble with. Oh, one could be pissy and say the very phrase “creative capitalism” is a redundancy. Isn’t creativity the point of capitalism? And on a more substantive point, one could make the case that Milton Friedman’s famous insistence that corporations existed solely for the purpose of increasing shareholder value does not necessarily exclude serving other constituencies or even emphasizing philanthropy or cause-related marketing. I’ve always believed that Friedman was just waiting for someone to point that out–it isn’t either/or, it’s both. Otherwise the particular market goes haywire and the investors get screwed. Hedge fund boyos who justified their greed on Friedman’s opinion shouldn’t be cited with what’s wrong with capitalism but what’s wrong with  pampered jerks with no social  or societal sense.

In a former life, I dared say that to the managers of Northwest Bancorporation, and they all readily agreed, and generated profits and invested in preserving the viability of the marketplace without thinking there was any inconsistency. This was back in the ’70s. Life seemed simpler then.

But Mr. Gates deserves credit for being passionate, thoughtful and lucid.

And, finally, here’s my own exhortation. Did Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain.or their handlers read the article and if so what did they think? The first presidential candidate to call for a summit on creative capitalism will win the election. The electorate’s raw nerve is a sense, I believe, that the system doesn’t work anymore, and the sooner its government calls for a discussion on the nature of and opportunities for capitalism the sooner the political balm will be applied.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, God bless the rich who don’t just fall back on self-indulgence and platitudes. We don’t need another fatuous book on corporate ethics; we need creative economic thinking. Put the issues on a big table and let’s start talking

Submitted with an eye on making a buck here or there,

C.N.