Steve Jobs: Capitalist
By Michael Graham | Monday, October 10, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Op-Ed “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”
— Occupy Wall Street Web site.
In the struggle between “Occupation” and “Jobs,” I’m firmly on the side of “Jobs.” Steve Jobs.
God’s sense of irony was on full display last week when the death of the world’s most famous college dropout pushed America’s ungrateful grads off the front page. And the best part?
Nearly every one of those BU boneheads and Northeastern nutjobs owns an iPhone.
By any measure Steve Jobs was part of the evil, greedy “1 percent” the Occupods are protesting. You hate “rich corporations?” Apple is literally the most valuable company in the world, worth around $400 billion.
Do you agree with the Occupy Boston protester denouncing millionaires for “using their wealth to undermine the democratic process?” Well, Steve Jobs was worth about $8 billion when he died.
And if you despise those cut-throat capitalists who crack the whip over their helpless employees, you absolutely hated Steve Jobs.
“Mr. Jobs also leaves behind innumerable tales about his mercurial management style,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in his obit, “such as his habit of calling employees or their ideas ‘dumb’ when he didn’t like something.” When Jobs returned to Apple in the late ‘90s, he fired four of the company’s five senior executives and replaced them with his team.
If the Occupation had an FBI, Steve Jobs would be Public Enemy #1.
The same morning we learned of Jobs’ death, I heard a poli-sci major tell a reporter that “College . . . is supposed to guarantee entry into the middle class.” That was his word: “guarantee.”
Here’s a kid at an elite university living a better lifestyle than 90 percent of the people on the planet looking for his “guarantee” of future happiness.
Compare this “scholar” with Jobs in 1974. Forget some elite Northeast university, he couldn’t afford Reed College in Oregon. He was so broke that sometimes he had to sleep on the floor of a friend’s dorm room. His first “big-time” computer job was working in a friend’s garage.
No college, no diploma, no money and absolutely no “guarantees.” Can you imagine taking one of today’s “precious snowflake” protesters and sending them back to the 1970s to face that? We’d have to send a bag of Depends along, too.
Another NU student, whining about her “$125,000 in student loans,” complained that “students don’t have lobbyists.” (They also don’t have to sign $125,000 worth of loan applications, either.)
Well, you know who else didn’t have a lobbyist? Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, or Herman Cain, or Flickr founder Caterina Flake, or Oprah or — probably — these kids’ moms and dads. So should these people have dropped their keyboards, picked up their cardboard and marched their “Eat The Rich” signs to the nearest bank?
Think of how bleak America would be if the young Jobs and Gates and Oprahs had followed the example of the Occupiers, if they had put “complaining” ahead of “accomplishing.” If they had believed that collective effort was more important than individual success.
Steve Jobs had to collect bottles for money and walked seven miles to the Hare Krishna temple for a meal. Then he revolutionized the computer industry. Then he got fired by his own company. So he revolutionized the world again.
Steve Jobs’ success came because he was willing to work, to risk and to revolutionize, all with no “guarantees.”
The Occupiers are failures because they aren’t willing to even try unless someone promises them first that they’re going to win.
Which is why Steve Jobs’ “1 percent” will always be bigger than their “99.”
Michael Graham hosts an afternoon drive-time talk show on 96.9 WTKK.
Article URL:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1372204
