Human
Events...
The Miracle
of iCapitalism
by Michelle Malkin
10/07/2011
Here
is your high-resolution teachable
moment of the week: anti-capitalist, anti-corporate extremists of
“Occupy Wall
Street” mourning Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs without a trace of irony.
While
the Kamp Alinsky Kids ditch
school to moan about their massive student debt, parade around in
zombie
costumes and whine about evil corporations over poached Wi-Fi
connections, it’s
the doers and producers and wealth creators like Jobs who change the
world.
They are the gifted 1 percent whom the “99 percenters” mob seeks to
demonize,
marginalize and tax out of existence.
Inherent
in the American success story
of the iMac/iPhone/iPad is a powerful lesson about the fundamentals of
capitalism. The “Occupiers” chant “people over profit.” They call for
“caring”
over “corporations.”
But
the pursuit of profits empowers
people beyond the bounds of imagination.
I
blog on an iMac. When I travel, I
bring my MacBook Pro. I Tweet news links from my iPhone. My kids are
learning
Photoshop and GarageBand on our Macs; they use metronome, dictation,
video and
camera apps daily. I use the technology for business, pleasure, social
networking, raising awareness of the missing, finding recipes and even
tuning a
ukulele.
None
of the countless people involved
in conceiving these products and bringing them to market “care” about
me. They
pursued their own self-interests. Through the spontaneous order of
capitalism,
they enriched themselves -- and the world.
One
of my favorite economics essays
from which I’ve drawn bottomless inspiration is Leonard Read’s “I,
Pencil.” He
turned a mundane writing instrument into an elementary study of
free-market capitalism.
What goes for the pencil goes for any of the products Jobs introduced.
“I
have a profound lesson to teach,”
Read wrote in the voice of a metaphorical lead pencil. “I can teach
this lesson
better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher
because
-- well, because I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single
person on
the face of this earth knows how to make me.”
Read
traces the family tree of the
pencil from the Oregon loggers who harvest its cedar wood, to the
California
millworkers who cut the wood into thin slats, to Mississippi refinery
workers,
to the Dutch East Indies farmers who produce an oil used to make
erasers. All
of these people, and many more at the periphery of the process, have
special knowledge
about their life’s work in their separate corners of the earth. But
none by
himself has the singular knowledge or ability to give birth to a
pencil. Few
will ever come in contact with the others who make the production of
that
pencil possible.
It’s
not because they “care about each
other” that they cooperate to deliver any one good. It’s the result of
self-interest, multiplied millions of times over.
Read
illuminates: “There is a fact
still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone
dictating or
forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being.
No trace
of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at
work.”
This spontaneous “configuration of human energies” is repeated
endlessly in our
daily lives. Think of the countless and diverse people involved in
producing a
Slinky, jump rope or baseball, a diaper, refrigerator or Boeing 747.
And,
of course, an iMac, iPhone or
iPad.
Appreciating
this voluntary configuration
of human energies, Read argued, is key to possessing “an absolutely
essential
ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible
without
this faith.” Indeed. Without that faith, we are susceptible to the
force of
class-warfare mobs and the arrogance of command-and-control bureaucrats
in
Washington who believe the role of private American entrepreneurs,
producers
and wealth generators is to “grow the economy” and who “think at some
point you
have made enough money.”
The
progressives who want to bring
down “Wall Street” will snipe that Jobs was one of “theirs,” not “ours.”
He
belonged to no one. He was
transcendently committed to excellence and beauty and innovation. And
yes, he
made gobs of money pursuing it all while benefiting hundreds of
millions of
people around the world whom he never met, but who shed a deep river of
tears
upon learning of his death this week.
From
“I, Pencil” to iPhone, such is
the profound, everlasting miracle of iCapitalism -- a triumph of
individualism
over collectivism, freedom over force and markets over master planning.
To
borrow an old Apple slogan: It just works.
Read
it at Human Events
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