The Politics of Steve Jobs

Judging from Steve Job's final advice to Obama -- "that the administration needed to be more business-friendly", that "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult to build factories in the United States and, crucially, that "until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform" -- his personal opinions were far more at home on the WSJ op-ed page, than that of the NY Times.

On the other hand, Apple customers are understood to be predominately Democratic. This is, in part, due to -- as Jobs critiqued -- Microsoft and Google being "pure technology" companies that "never had the humanities and the liberal arts in the DNA". While techies may love their gadgets infinitely customize-able, non-geeks can be confused, or even scared, by over-configure-ability, and, so, prefer technology that works simply. In other words, Apple's appeal lay, largely, in enabling -- for a premium -- the tech-phobic to pose as tech-savvy. One frequent implicit claim of this blog, is that there is an direct analogy in this to the appeal of Democratic politics.

On a darker note, there is more then a touch of nihilism, in the sense of beauty mixed with cruelty, surrounding Jobs, his products and, perhaps, his customers.

Sexual McCarthyism

After a number of anonymous, and unspecific, allegations of sexual harassment, were leveled against Herman Cain, one Sharon Bialek has come forward with a specific allegation. Her claim contains a corroborated un-serious allegation and an un-corroborated serious one.

The un-serious claim is that Cain made an "unwanted physical advance." As she relays it, he telegraphed his intent clearly and well in advance -- "upgrading her room at the Capital Hilton to a grandiose suite" and rather than, as initially suggested, meeting for coffee, taking her out to dinner and drinks -- and she chose to not clarify her intent. As soon as she did, in her own telling, he stopped and took her back to her hotel.

More serious is the implication that he would have given her a job had she slept with him. While she provided no corroboration, if true, it is unlikely an isolated incident. It will inevitably come out if there are other women to whom Cain made similar offers. Perhaps Politico will now dig up every woman hired during Cain's tenure at the NRA, and ask if they slept with him.

Cain's talk of "lynching", and comparison with Justice Thomas, is not entirely off-base. Was Cain not conservative, the responsible media would be reminding us -- justly -- of the legacy of racism with which this sort of sexual McCarthyism resonates.

Cultural Capital

David Brooks, I suppose, fancies himself conservative for writing things like:

it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. But the fact is... it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent... If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda.

He is certainly correct up to a point: cultural capital matters -- big government policies that disregard that are doomed to fail. He, and others, however, imagine that there are other, smarter, big government policies which can, taking cultural capital into account, succeed.

Structurally, these arguments take some factor which is correlated to cultural capital (e.g.: home ownership, college education), latch on to any tenuous rationale arguing the relationship is causal (People take better care of things they own! College graduates have wider social networks!), push expensive government programs with inevitable unintended consequences that, equally inevitably, fail because wishful thinking cannot turn correlation into causation.

Von Hayek taught that the natural, evolutionary, processes of free societies tend to increase cultural capital. More traditional conservative teaching would accentuate the role played by community. In either case: A government which governs least expands opportunity best.