Of course we are all mourning the death of Steve Jobs. Virginia Postrel wrote an especially nice appreciation of him back in August. My own one meeting with Steve Jobs came 30 or more years ago, when I was invited to a dinner at Congressman Pete Stark’s house at which Jobs was the honored guest. This was in, I believe, in the late 1970s, and Jobs was trying to convince Washington types that the government should buy a computer for every student. Of course he had a particular kind of computer in mind, an early Apple model.
This suggests that Jobs’s business strategy early on—or at least one of his business strategies—was to use personal connections and political pull to get big contracts. Or rent seeking, as my Examiner colleague Tim Carney would call it, as the way forward or at least one way forward. Apples in the classroom would probably have been an improvement in most cases, but Jobs wanted them there whether it improved education or not.
Of course Jobs changed his mind about that. At the helm of once again, over the last 10 years Jobs has revolutionized one industry and business after another by creating products for which there turned out to be huge demand in the private sector—and in whose success government collaboration was not a factor at all. His career can be cited for the proposition that you can do better and can do better things by seeking private sector success than by getting the government to give you a rent-seeking niche.
