How did Steve Jobs create so many outstanding products without Barack Obama’s investment?
In barely three decades, Jobs helped create a tech revolution — from product to infrastructure — without a dollar of federal help.While snake-oil salesmen Obama claims to know the future and blow taxpayer dollars on it, Jobs and his peers hatched ideas that attracted billions of dollars of private capital. The result is a digital infrastructure that spans the globe totally independent of government subsidy.
Currently flogging her Big Government treatise, A Governor’s Story, Obama twin and ex-Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm declares new technologies will only get off the ground with government subsidy — what she calls “a partnership with business.” Granobama claims that private markets are incapable of leveraging the “interstates of the future.”
Yet Apple’s digital revolution did exactly that. The iPhone and its predecessors spawned consumer products in such demand that investors sunk billions into a cell infrastructure that blankets America and beyond. And it’s not just phone service. You want alternatives? Think 3G and 4G digital networks, wireless infrastructure, cloud computing, and other innovation that Big Government never saw coming.
Jobs’s digital revolution did nothing to humble these Harvard Law–trained Masters of the Universe.
They blindly spout dogma that they alone know the “technologies of the future.” Solar. Wind. Electric cars. Indeed, we are fortunate that Jen and Barack were not in power when Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniaki first innovated the PC computer. They might have tried to strangle it.
Today, America is in the midst of an energy revolution as entrepreneurs like Harold Hamm of Continental Resources innovate horizontal-drilling technologies promising to double U.S. oil reserves. Yet when Hamm joined other businessmen in a meeting with The One recently, he got the cold shoulder. “I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this,” Hamm relays to the Wall Street Journal.
The president’s reaction?
“He turned to me and said, ‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.” One can hear Obama now . . .
“Oh sure, Mr. Jobs, coal-powered PCs will be important for the next few years. But Chu has assured me that within five years, we can power mainframes with wind turbines.”
Government know-it-alls ignore the capitalist incentives that unleashed Steve Jobs. Granobama claim that startups cannot compete against Big Business and their army of lobbyists — so they pour millions of tax dollars into Tesla and Fisker in order to “innovate” the “battery-powered cars of the future.” Wrong again.
The cellular industry took on that most entrenched establishment — Big Telecom and land-line telephony — and won. Investor billions poured into handheld start-ups once they proved that cell tech was viable. Why don’t markets invest money in the solar industry? Because it cannot compete. Solyndra’s owners needed federal funds because — unlike Jobs — they had failed to prove its worth.
Steve Jobs is proof that private capital discovers the tech of the future. Granobama never saw it coming.
I am generally in agreement with Mr. Payne.
However.
He implies that Jobs and the other PC innovators foresaw the future and then created it. What happened in fact is that the future they helped create evolved, in a process very much like that of natural selection in biology. Had Jobs and Gates happened to go into another line of work or aspect of business that wasn't as economically "fit," we would never have heard of them. Being highly competent men, they would no doubt have been personally successful, but they would not have changed the world and become household names. IOW, a great deal of their success was "luck." They caught a wave that they also helped create.
The analogy between competition in the free market and evolution in biology is quite close. Each seldom, if ever, produces the optimum result by some arbitrary standard created by an uninvolved bystander, but they generally create something that WORKS.
The irony is that the group of people that believes most strongly in evolution in biology tends to also be the group that rejects it in economics. These people believe it is workable for some all-seeing, all-knowing outside entity to decide for the system which economic projects will and should succeed, and "invest" massive sums of the taxpayers' money accordingly.
Creationists, in America at least, tend to believe in economic evolution in the free market while rejecting it in biology. I would contend they are at least more logical than their opponents because they don't claim their all-knowing controlling outside entity is just another fallible human, but is rather the omniscient Deity.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWow. I have to say, that is one of the best and most insightful observations I've read in the comments of anything in a long time. You should write a book on that (if you haven't already!).
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuseits time for our disgusting self centered prez to take his final fly over the statue of liberty and resign for the good of the country
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'd like to ask Jennifer Granholm whether she has ever read any books on economics. Not polemics written by leftists about economic topics, but any books on economics--a textbook, a book like Sowell's "Basic Economics," or any at all. (Marx doesn't count, as he didn't write about economics but about fantasies.)
I would bet the answer is not only no, but utter befuddlement about the question.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHmmm.. wasn't the internet funded by the US Govt? And then the World Wide Web invented at CERN, another evil, govt funded institution?
Nasty governments... giving stuff away for free.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTo be absolutely fair, it was the military that developed the predecessor to the Internet. It gradually opened out to universities and companies working with the military, and then, G-jobs expanded it out to the public. If the public didn't want it, it would have stayed within the military.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe secret of Mr. Jobs (and Mr. Gates) successes is quite simple. They concentrated their lives, and then their companies, on making products people would buy. No sales, kill the products (good riddance Newton and Clippy).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow did Steve Jobs create so many outstanding products without Barack Obama’s investment?
In barely three decades, Jobs helped create a tech revolution — from product to infrastructure — without a dollar of federal help...ex-Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm declares new technologies will only get off the ground with government subsidy — what she calls “a partnership with business.”
You know that, if you were to press that issue, the response you'd get is that Apple's success is, in many ways, built on the internet, which is obviously built on work done by the DoD and funded by taxpayers. Without the "information superhighway" to distribute digital media, there is no iPod market, there is no iPad market, and Apple is just the company that took that Xerox-developed icon interface and used it for personal computers that didn't have as many applications and accessories available as all the rest...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes, the protocols that the Internet runs were developed at DARPA, but they were, are, far from the only networking protocols out there. It eventually won out in the marketplace. Interconnectivity was going to happen, and companies would have adapted to whatever technology came out on top.
Oh, and the "Internet" was developed using NeXT computers, a Steve Jobs company.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHorizontal drilling technology was developed only when the sustained price of gas and oil justified the investment in its development. I have been in the oil industry since the '60's and it was well known back then that recovering oil from shale would eventually take place.
The government has no such constraint on investing. As such, it is easy to see how the granting of government subsidies to "emerging technologies" that are not yet ready for prime time can become very counterproductive.
Obama's dismissal of the new oil and gas technologies, in favor of unfounded projections for "green" technologies, is typical of how the bureucratic mind, with no grounding in business realites, operates.
Mr. Logan's analogy to evolution and the ironies are very apt.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt a shame Barry has blinders on. If he was thinking correctly, the oil guy would have been the most important person in the room.
Why?
Because he could be the person who puts thousands of people to work, with good pay, in the next couple of years, if you get out of his way.
Maybe even soon enough to save Obama's own job.
Ignoring guys like that is going to cost him his "second" term. The traditional energy business could be the force that help bring an end to this recession-depression. If they merely allow them to do their jobs.
Obama has a ideology that would rather people be unemployed then allow jobs they don't like.
Hope the next president in early January 2013 meets with this guy.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSIRI was a DARPA project only five years ago.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe information superhighway is just that, a superhighway. It is legitimate for the government to fund these highways, not the conveyances that run on them.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf I start calling my driveway a superhighway, can I get govt funding for it as well?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMaybe. Check with your accountant.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSteve Jobs created something that provided great value at a price customers were willing to pay.
Solar PV creates inferior unreliable kWh at 20-25 times the price of the natural gas(3 cents/kWh) it displaces. Only government is stupid enough to make this investment.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRather than trying to pick winners like Solyndra, a better approach is to make sure that each industry simply pays its full costs (e.g. end direct and indirect subsidies) and let the market decide. For fossil fuels, that means paying for the effects of pollution, requiring carbon capture, ending direct tax subsidies (many times greater than green investments), and offsetting military costs to have safe access to foreign oil. That would create a fair marketplace leading to optimal market decisions. The political leverage of fossil fuel companies have prevented these measures and have led to less desireable ways to spur energy competition like direct subsidies.
Also consider the importance of infrastructure and the role of government in new technology development. Is it merely a coincidence that most of the major technology revolutions of this century (the computer, the internet, semi-conductors, satellites and cellular phones, to name just a few) were originally developed by the government and public research universities? In terms of attracting, training, and retaining the best scientific minds, building out technical infrastructure for research, and ability to do research that has a long development time frame, public/private partnership is a huge part of our success in technical development and a big reason the U.S. has a healthy development environment.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSource, please, for the statment that "direct tax subsidies [are] many times greater than green investments."
Till I get one, and believe it, I'll continue to figure that it involves: a) classifying things as "subsidies" that every company gets; b) on a dollar-for-dollar basis, not a more reasonable basis such as per energy generated.
"Green" energy costs 3-10 times as much to generate. It might not if you actually "required carbon capture" for fossil fuels, IE, if the public really believed it was worth imposing that kind of cost on energy generation to prevent the emission of a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that all of us breathe out but might result in apocalyptic warmodoom 100 years from now if you believe the projections of people who have powerful vested interests in alarmism. But that's what's at issue here, isn't it? Before you can internalize an externality the public has to agree on the cost of that externality.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI was just taking a Sunday drive. I passed a new, upscale home that had a wind turbine in the back yard. The blades were not spinning, as it was calm today. I remarked, "I don't think their $100,000 investment is producing any electricity".
'Nuff said.
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