Steve Jobs was capitalism at its best. Let's not make him the champion of capitalism at its worst.
Wednesday night, my Twitter feed—after the Phillies game ended—was primarily concerned with two things: Occupy Wall Street, and the death of Steve Jobs. It's terribly dangerous to mash up two wildly disparate news stories and find a Common Meaning in them, but I was struck nonetheless. And so I Tweeted my thoughts : That while capitalism has real, sometimes huge flaws, it is also capable—uniquely so, in my opinion—of offering us goods and services that help us survive, thrive, and extend our abilities. I think it's also largely true, as Rod Dreher said —and he, incidentally, is no fan of Big Corporatism—"socialism just doesn’t produce a Steve Jobs." But I think National Review's Kevin D. Williamson takes the Jobs-as-awesome-capitalist meme too far: Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase i