In this particular example, the value was not created by Bill Gates or Microsoft, he only leveraged his connected position to sell IBM somebody else's product. The value was created by someone else.

So no, I'm not stuck on the position "it's easier for some people than others to create value", I'm stuck on the "arbitrage is not creating value" position.

I'm not saying that Bill Gates wrote, maintained, upgraded, marketed, sold, etc Microsoft software all by himself. I'm saying that he created value for his customers, and so they paid him.

He did that via a series of voluntary (again, this is the private sector, where you have to make a voluntary agreement with someone - you can't just throw them in jail if they don't pay you the taxes you decided you want) agreements with other businesses, and with employees, and with customers.

As I wrote before; I don't think that arbitrage and gatekeeping are the same as creating value. It's capturing the differences in the perceptions of value of two parties. But it's not creating said value.

Let's once again go back to the Microsoft/IBM deal; what value exactly would have Bill Gates able to "create" for IBM, if not for the exiting work of 86-DOS?

Nothing. Because in this case there was no value created by him. He would have had to write he required software to actually deliver the value instead.

And that's the case in many of such dealings. You could get rid of all the gatekeepers and arbitrage-takers and there would still be value to be sold. But get rid of the value-creators and the gatekeepers and arbitrage-takers don't have anything to work with.

Gatekeeping and leveraging of existing value is just another form of market failure.

Free markets operate under the assumption that all the market participants have total knowledge about the various offers at hand. If they don't know the various offers, then they cannot make an informed decision; the market fails. Gatekeepers and arbitrage benefit from this market failure.

We can of course to agree to disagree.