Bill Gates must not be reading from Edward Abraham's playbook.  In his remarks to the Harvard graduating class of 2007, the Monarch of Microsoft spread his mighty wings and soared to a place where even 50 Billion dollars couldn’t take him.

Friends, Romans, countrymen. Lend this Man your ear.  I am not here to bury Caesar, but to praise him:

“Taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.  I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.”

Impressed, are you?  Shocked, even?  Oh, it gets much better:

“But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.”

Oh my.  Beautiful stuff.  Wait, there’s more?

“I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.  It took me decades to find out.”

I’m coming unglued here.  Please, you’ll have to read on without me:

“We [Gates and wife Melinda] were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.”

“If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”

“The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.”

“But you and I have both.”

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Bill Gates is definitely the world’s richest man, now.

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