Before Bill Gates even had chance to present his ideas for "creative capitalism," the National Review's Larry Kudlow had already misrepresented Gates's argument:

I just have to smile when a billionaire like Bill Gates turns a cold shoulder to the blessings capitalism bestows. Or when his buddy, Warren Buffett, broadcasts the importance of hiking tax rates on successful earners and investors. Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn't noticed, it was a miserable failure.

What's in the drinking water at this place called Davos?

Of course, the Wall Street Journal article from which Kudlow based his comments explicitly noted, "Mr. Gates isn't abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system."

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And if you look at what Gates actually said, he didn't call for governments to seize control of the means of production. Nor, truth be told, did he actually say anything profoundly new. He just wants to push for "an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities." 

Another Davos-goer mentioned in Gates's speech, FP contributor C.K. Prahalad, has long advocated that businesses sell to the "bottom of the pyramid"—the poorest of the poor. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, named in 2005 by FP and Prospect magazine as one of the world's 100 top public intellectuals, literally wrote the book on why capitalism runs aground in some of the poorer areas of the world. De Soto also won the Cato Institute's "Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty" in 2004. So Gates is well within the bounds of acceptable capitalist discourse.

Maybe he's wrong—and in today's WSJ article FP contributor Bill Easterly raises an important question about the effectiveness of efforts to sell to the poor—but Gates is no socialist. He also recognizes, as he said in his speech, that "profits are not always possible when business tries to serve the very poor" and that we need to find other incentives—not Soviet diktats—for companies that do so. Gates's final closing remarks were a humble plea for market-driven efforts to combat poverty:

I'd like to ask everyone here—whether you're in business, government or the non-profit world—to take on a project of creative capitalism in the coming year. It doesn't have to be a new project; you could take an existing project, and see where you might stretch the reach of market forces to help push things forward. When you award foreign aid, when you make charitable gifts, when you try to change the world—can you also find ways to put the power of market forces behind the effort to help the poor?

That's hardly a call to implement the recommendations of Das Kapital. Too bad Kudlow would rather launch ideological polemics and attack strawmen than consider Gates's ideas on their merits.