Henry Payne, NRO:
While snake-oil salesmen Obama claims to know the future and blow taxpayer dollars on it, Jobs and his peers hatched ideas that attracted billions of dollars of private capital. The result is a digital infrastructure that spans the globe totally independent of government subsidy.
Currently flogging her Big Government treatise, A Governor’s Story, Obama twin and ex-Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm declares new technologies will only get off the ground with government subsidy — what she calls “a partnership with business.” Granobama claims that private markets are incapable of leveraging the “interstates of the future.”
Yet Apple’s digital revolution did exactly that. The iPhone and its predecessors spawned consumer products in such demand that investors sunk billions into a cell infrastructure that blankets America and beyond. And it’s not just phone service. You want alternatives? Think 3G and 4G digital networks, wireless infrastructure, cloud computing, and other innovation that Big Government never saw coming.
Jobs’s digital revolution did nothing to humble these Harvard Law–trained Masters of the Universe.
They blindly spout dogma that they alone know the “technologies of the future.” Solar. Wind. Electric cars. Indeed, we are fortunate that Jen and Barack were not in power when Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniaki first innovated the PC computer. They might have tried to strangle it.
Today, America is in the midst of an energy revolution as entrepreneurs like Harold Hamm of Continental Resources innovate horizontal-drilling technologies promising to double U.S. oil reserves. Yet when Hamm joined other businessmen in a meeting with The One recently, he got the cold shoulder. “I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this,” Hamm relays to the Wall Street Journal.
The president’s reaction?
“He turned to me and said, ‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.”
[…]
Government know-it-alls ignore the capitalist incentives that unleashed Steve Jobs. Granobama claim that startups cannot compete against Big Business and their army of lobbyists — so they pour millions of tax dollars into Tesla and Fisker in order to “innovate” the “battery-powered cars of the future.” Wrong again.
The cellular industry took on that most entrenched establishment — Big Telecom and land-line telephony — and won. Investor billions poured into handheld start-ups once they proved that cell tech was viable. Why don’t markets invest money in the solar industry? Because it cannot compete. Solyndra’s owners needed federal funds because — unlike Jobs — they had failed to prove its worth.
As I noted elsewhere, I’ve had no luck as of yet opening MapQuest on a solar panel.
I blame the insufferable greed of Steve Jobs — and pray for that the moral rectitude of Barack Obama and his band of faculty-lounge business experts to make this goddamn thing find me the nearest Applebees!
That is a very good post. I will read it on my iphone and forward to others.
As noted in the piece, Obama would have been more likely to kill Job’s ability to innovate, rather than help it.
The progressives continue to demonstrate that not only do they know nothing, they are incapable of learning anything that refutes their dogma.
“The progressives continue to demonstrate that not only do they know nothing, they are incapable of learning anything that refutes their dogma.”
It’s not that they know nothing, it’s that they know so much that’s not true.(paraphrasing Reagan)
THis is a remarkable post. Te dichotomy is just so striking. How did Hamm refrain from kicking someone in the teeth?!
How’d he do it?
He did by STEALING from the poor and downtrodden… and EXPLOITING the working class… and by TAKING ADVANTAGE OF his white privilege to raise venture capital from greedy racist bankers who’d rather give money to millionaires and billionaires instead of to poor people who just want a $350k home … and then he TOOK ADVANTAGE of all the roads and utilities and security provided for him by the hardworking american taxpayer’s beneficient government. And now its time for the rest of the 1% to give back… give until it hurts.
What I want to know is when these gov’t morons are going to acknowledge the source of the magical electricity that will run these miracle cars.
Seriously, do they think electricity comes from magic, or from the very same fossil fuel sources they hope to dispatch to the dustbin of history ?
What a bunch of twits.