Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Steve Jobs is...Francisco d'Anconia. And "Occupy Wall Street" Knows It...

Steve Jobs, until his passing today, was a living rebuke to Barack Obama, Big Government, and the entire ethos of the Democratic Party.

Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy.

That was from Kevin Williamson, in a piece entitled A Jobs Agenda.  Here's another excerpt  - penned by Williamson, not Ayn Rand - that Franscisco D'Anconica could have given easily in place of his famous "money speech":

Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values.

Ironically, the "Occupy Wall Street Crowd" should be dancing in the streets right now, at the death of one of the richest men in America.  But instead, they are frozen.  They can't even think of Jobs, because his life -and the profit they have gleaned from it, despite handing over so much of their (parent's) money to him -  is the fatal contradiction, the final proof, that the liberal/anarchist ideology they espouse is deeply, permanently flawed:

And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?

They want to have their cake, and eat it too.  Jobs and Rand would have both "Shrugged..."

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