As we consider life in America without Steve Jobs, we might also consider just how his staggering career represents a refutation of the economic philosophy of Barack Obama.
The president believes, as he said in his speech to a joint session of Congress last month, that American greatness can best be found in collective action.
While acknowledging the roles played by “rugged individualists” and “entrepreneurs,” he reserved his enthusiasm for grand projects under the aegis of government — roads, bridges, dams, airports and taxpayer dollars assigned by the Defense Department to a project that grew unexpectedly into the Internet.
“No single individual built America on their own,” he said. “We built it together.”
Of course, no single individual built America on his own, Mr. President; whoever said one did? But the life and career of Steve Jobs demonstrates what a single individual can do in America, and only in America.
Who built Apple? Who rebuilt Apple? Obviously, Jobs needed a great many people to put his plans into effect. But he built it. And after others almost destroyed it, he rebuilt it.
The result? As of September 2010, 49,400 people in the United States (and probably twice as many abroad) work for Apple to create its products, sell them, deliver them and help people use them.
That number has surely grown substantially since, as Apple stores proliferate, and will continue to do so as long as this remarkable company that once sold a niche product to 3 percent of the personal-computer market continues to sell and improve several of the most desirable consumer products in the world.
Add to that number the 1,000-plus jobs at Pixar, Jobs’ peerless animation studio that merged with Disney — and the thousands of jobs that were created by others to manufacture the branded products sold with Pixar characters and the like.
Yesterday, Obama again pushed Congress to pass his $447 billion stimulus. In one ludicrous estimation breathlessly cited by the president, the bill would create 1.9 million jobs, none of them permanent.
Steve Jobs himself probably created one-eighth of that number. Under Obama’s understanding of “job creation,” such an achievement should cost $60 billion.
The current value of Apple is $351 billion. In other words, those Apple jobs exist not as a cost but as a means of achieving profit. Those Jobs jobs were and are real; they were not summoned from the ether by a politician only to disappear when the funding runs out.
Steve Jobs owed his greatness to America but not because we Americans can do such great things if we act collectively. Jobs’ debt was to his country’s 235-year commitment to the idea that we possess God-given rights not only to life and to liberty but also to the pursuit of happiness.
Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford in 2005 when he told the graduates to “love what you do,” which is about as perfect a distillation of the “pursuit of happiness” as anything I’ve ever seen.
The obvious objection to this description of American greatness is that a Steve Jobs comes along once a century — that people don’t necessarily have the luxury of loving what they do or having the vision to effect it, and that our economic system has to be designed for their benefit and not to free up space for the next Steve Jobs.
That objection gets it entirely wrong. America’s greatness comes from Steve Jobs, and from everybody who has only a millionth in him of what he had — drive, determination, a hunger to succeed and the capacity to see better and greater things in the future than exist in the present.
Such people exist everywhere, in every nation on the planet. But their ability to pursue happiness is impeded by cultural and political roadblocks that the Founding Fathers removed from our path in their conception of the United States.
Barack Obama does not understand this. Steve Jobs did. He will be remembered as a greater American than the president during whose term he died.