The first lavish dinner of China President Hu Jintao’s historic visit to the United States next week will be in a big, secure house in Washington where the host is one of the world’s most powerful men.
The White House? No.
It won’t be in Washington D.C., but Seattle, and the Tuesday dinner will be held at the $100 million lakeside mansion of Microsoft founder and the world’s richest man, Bill Gates.
This amazing, but completely logical, development puts me in mind of Frederic Bastiat who thought that commerce was a much more powerful inducement towards peace than diplomats, balance of power and all the other statist methods. We might also note the huge difference between how the high tech commercial industry centered in Seattle and Silicon Valley (Microsoft, Google, etc.) has related to China and the Neocon sabre-rattling that often as not has come from Washington, DC. [Thanks digg]
9:52 am on April 17, 2006
