Sorry about the pun, but I can’t resist.
The GOP now strives to lionize Steve Jobs, spawning another round of lies to prop up their failed dogma. The lie goes something like “Steve Jobs created more jobs than President Obama’s stimulus package” (the version told by Mitch Daniels) or “Apple should reaffirm for us that American innovation is alive and kicking…Naturally, President Obama has a plan: punish them.” (John Sununu, today’s Globe).
The GOP would like to cast Steve Jobs as a “job creator”. Being dead, the late Mr. Jobs is not in a position to rebut the castle of lies the GOP is attempting to construct on his barely-cold body (unless spinning in the grave counts). One awkward truth is that Steve Jobs and Apple was famously and passionately anti-political. Another is that when Steve Jobs did contribute, he gave to Democrats. He gave $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 2000, and $26,700 to the DCCC in 2006 (IEEE Spectrum: In the Politics of Innovation, Steve Jobs Shows Less Is More). He appointed Al Gore as an Apple director, and yanked Apple out of the United States Chamber of Commerce in response to the flagrant denialism of that body.
The more profound truth about the “Steve Jobs as Job Creator” lie is that the overwhelming majority of the jobs he created were in China. Apple has created about 43,000 jobs in America. Apple has created about 700,000 jobs in China. That’s more than 16 to 1, and it exemplifies the downward spiral that the isolationist go-it-alone entrepreneur, so loved by the GOP, creates.
Paul Krugman, in yet another marvelous piece from last week, eloquently both paints the lie and spells out the superior alternative (emphasis mine):
The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.
But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.
And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so furiously opposed to the single most successful policy initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.
The case for this bailout — which Mr. Daniels has denounced as “crony capitalism” — rested crucially on the notion that the survival of any one firm in the industry depended on the survival of the broader industry “ecology” created by the cluster of producers and suppliers in America’s industrial heartland. If G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they would probably have taken much of the supply chain with them — and Ford would have gone the same way.
Fortunately, the Obama administration didn’t let that happen, and the unemployment rate in Michigan, which hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect, is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3 percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to apply the lessons of that success more broadly.
So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.
And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.
“Got his facts wrong” indeed — Mr. Krugman is too polite to call Mitch Daniels a liar. The GOP adds yet another lie to its already overweight baggage. If our political lie-detectors were as widespread as our airport metal detectors, the GOP would be landlocked and immobilized. The sheer audacity of these guys — their positive eagerness to stack one lie on another, apparently striving to reach the moon with dishonesty (is that the secret to Newt Gingrich’s moon fantasies?) — is breathtaking.
The cheesy tackiness of the GOP effort to ride the coattails of the legacy left by Steve Jobs is simply disgusting.
Why do you swallow every word of former Enron avisor Krugman? The man has been proven to be perfidious and untruthful many, many times: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204573704577187081831886976.html?KEYWORDS=JAMES+TARANTO
That tells me all I need to know. 😀
James Taranto, moron.
Do you challenge the substance of what I wrote?
Do you challenge the reality that Apple has created 16 Chinese jobs for every American job?
Do you challenge the reality that Germany pays its workers, on average, far more than America ($44 an hour) yet remains a successful exporter?
Do you argue that the GOP dogma of the “lone wolf” entrepreneur, acting alone, is outperforming the German “Mittelstand”?
Do you argue, along with Mitch Daniels, that the automobile bailout was a FAILURE, rather than the success it clearly was? Would the American automobile industry be in better shape today if the government had pursued policies that would have driven everyone but Ford into bankruptcy?
Aside from your relentless ad hominem attacks on Paul Krugman, what say you to the SUBSTANCE of the question?
automobile industry, but also to the fact that Americans are not buying that joke volt buggy (otherwise known as the greenies’ folly :)??http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120130/AUTO01/201300393/Treasury-ups-auto-bailout-loss-estimate?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE%7Cs
you, Edgar, but then I thought, why?
you, Edgar, but then I thought, why?
If you haven’t seen this elsewhere, this is life working for Apple in a story from the Times:
Poor design, last-minute changes, and managerial mismanagement covered by treating your workers like cattle. Sound’s like the GOP’s vision for America, actually.
presented by the Detroit News and cited above. Also, I don’t know where the heck Tom got his $44 hourly wage in Germany. Only certain professions there have minimums, and the highest, construction, is much closer to our standard. From your very own World Socialist Website:http://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Country=Germany/Salary
is the World Socialist take, and it is not pretty as regard to employment in Germany: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/oct2007/wage-o11.shtml
It appears that the only “substance” Tom has to offer on this issue is the use of cheap, foreign labour by those great humanitarians at Apple.
I’m not sure why you think I’d find a rant from a socialist website persuasive.
I wonder what you think of this piece from Forbes:
Hmm. Of particular interest is BMW — a “very German company [with a] very German Hierarchy and management system in Germany, yet when they are operating in Spartanburg [South Carolina] they have become very very easily adaptable to Spartanburg business culture”. It seems that Volkswagen, another German company, pays its nonunionized new employees in Chattanooga $14.50/hr, rising to $19.50 after three years. Why do these companies behave so differently in America? According to the piece, Claude Barfield of the American Enterprise Institute (noted for its right-leaning stance on most issues) says “Because they can get away with it so far.”
That piece cites another longer and more in-depth look at the question.
It seems that the Germans pay their automobile workers more than twice what Americans are paid, the Germans produce more than twice as many vehicles, and the German companies are more profitable.
Meanwhile, it’s the GOP who is currently attempting to lionize Apple and Steve Jobs, you’ll hear none of that malarky from me. I knew the man, I worked with him. Whatever it was he was, Steve Jobs was NOT a humanitarian.
From your very own comment: “….In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million” And please don’t tell me how wonderfully successful the Volt will be. As long as GM (Government Motors) is controlled by the bureaucrats in D.C. they will continue to go down the proverbial tubes. Did you take the time to read the Detroit News article?
That place where unions appoint a significant fraction of the board of directors? Where major managerial decisions are made in union-management decisions where defacto mutual veto power exists? That’s you model?
Don’t let Dan Winslow find out you’re supporting this…
Sorry, Edgar, but your “logic” is failed.
I posted your own quote which shows that Germany outproduced us by 2 to 1 in cars in 2010. I was not supporting the so-called German collectif, but simply proving another Krugman falsehood.
Except for your statements about Apple/Steve Jobs I see no substance at all to your Enron-adviser inspired remarks. Sorry about this, but sometimes you make no sense at all.
I don’t see that you’ve “proven” anything.
The bailout of Detroit was far preferable to driving the automobile industry into bankruptcy. The cost to the taxpayer is far less than what it would cost America if nothing had been done. Nothing in what I’ve said in any way contradicts the reality that the German automobile industry outperforms the American automobile industry.
Why? Because the economic delusions of the GOP haven’t infected Germany.
…why to you always refer to Krugman by association to Enron? Krugman is not responsible for the criminal behavoir of Ken Lay et alia.
people like Tom who for some reason or other consider him the Economics God. We know from his history that he worked for Enron as a highly paid consultant. To see some of the ridiculous things that he has prophesied and said, check my cite from the WallStreetJournal to James Taranto.
How productive! How interesting! How intelligent! How warm-hearted!
One of Jobs’s criticisms that I’ve heard told is that the ‘supportive environment’ that is needed to sustain an industrial base in a country didn’t exist for high-tech products in America, and that Apple couldn’t build everything here if he wanted.
Maybe that’s true at this point, or maybe it isn’t, but the point is that even Steve Jobs believed what Krugman does. Thankfully, though, whether or not that criticism is true today or not, a lot is going into the direction of it *not* being true in the future. Growth in chips manufacturing and other key high-tech parts is building rapidly in America, with major factories built recently as far apart as Buffalo and Austin.
As a country, we should ensure that more of them are built, because what we think of as being ‘high tech’ is soon going to be built in everything, from cars to refrigerators to home heating systems. We need to get in on that.