When Jonas Salk gave his vaccine to mankind, asking for nothing in return, he sent a message to the world. Science is something apart from commerce, something higher than commerce. Its goals are humanitarian rather than commercial in nature.
If this message was heard at all, it was soon forgotten.
Capitalism represents the most successful attempt yet to tame and domesticate genius, to make it useful to the rulers of the regime. Genius is qualitatively different from anything in the bourgeois world. Once traded for a sum of money, no matter how large, it ceases to be qualitatively different, and enters the realm where values are measured by accountants. By succumbing to the lure of comforts and rewards, genius ceases to be genius and becomes just another bourgeois asset. Tamed and domesticated genius is no longer genius.
In order to avoid the necessity of trading itself for wages, genius must of course have a certain amount of wealth. The error of the bourgeois is to mistake how much that amount is. He wants opulence and a corps of servants like the wealthy, but unlike the wealthy, to whom these things come unbidden, he must destroy his genius in order to obtain them.
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