Jake Davison

Why isn’t anyone describing Steve Jobs as a billionaire, corporate robber baron whose products depend on oil (plastics)? Just because the Justice Department never got around to investigating and witch-hunting his success before he passed away? Because Apple’s brand is so hip and anti-corporate that Apple is somehow not an international corporate behemoth that has a near monopoly on several products?

Last I checked, Jobs still hadn’t allowed Apple to be organized by the United Software Workers of America. Do you get a pass from class warfare rhetoric if you invent the 21st Century as Jobs did? Unlike the car, which most Americans have been able to afford for 75 years, are we still simply too impressed by and grateful for our laptops, iPods, iTunes, iPhones and iPads? Perhaps it will take another generation before we turn on Apple. People used to think Henry Ford was a hero too.

Jobs didn’t just “expect the best.” He was often a whip-cracking despot who could drive his workers to the brink of physical and mental collapse in order to achieve his status as a “visionary.” His products could never have happened in a union shop. Steve Jobs created hundreds of thousands of jobs. He also destroyed tens of thousands of jobs of those who worked for his competitors by making their products irrelevant. If you worked at IBM in the 1980s and got laid off, thank Steve Jobs.

Jobs stands for all the smaller, less brilliant creators who actually create the wealth that politicians and their consultants, lawyers, accountants, staff and pressure groups fight over. Politicians and their industry of pundits and consultants like me just move the money created by the creators around. By this standard, Jobs is the single greatest American of the past 60 years. I am a free-market Republican, so putting Jobs over Reagan isn’t easy. Reagan never invented anything. His conservatism was in fact a rare modesty for a politician. Reagan knew where jobs came from and knew it wasn’t his brilliance, but rather his modest tax and regulatory relief.

Business makes this country run. To deny this, to say that business exists because of good government policies, is like saying your heart is less responsible for your being alive than the doctor who encourages you to exercise and eat right. Politicians, their staffs, their consultants, the pro-big government non-profit pressure groups (from the Michigan Catholic Conference to the SEIU to the Sierra Club) merely extort or beg (fundraise) for some of the wealth business creates to enable their efforts to later force (at the perfectly legal and constitutional point of a policeman’s gun that is the fundamental, underlying power of government) business to surrender more of their wealth. If you don’t pay the political class for protection, it will result in the election of politicians who will then make you pay more. If you refuse to pay more, they will take you forcibly from your home and put you in a cage.

Why are politicians of even the most anti-corporate sentiments wearing sackcloth for Apple’s ultra-rich CEO? To borrow a line from my North Star Writers Group colleague Dan Calabrese, “Because Jobs is now the kind of billionaire corporate robber baron they like. A dead one.”

Jake Davison is a North Star Writers Group columnist and president of Advantage Associates, a Michigan-based campaign consulting, public relations and public policy research firm. Jake can be reached at jd@youradvantage.org.

© 2011 North Star Writers Group

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