It’s clear that despite the reported change from Steve Jobs being a technically brilliant egomaniac and abrasive leader in his early years to a technically brilliant, more humble and far more subtle leader in his later years a couple things always remained:

-His appreciation of intuitive design that serves the customers.
-His lifelong appreciation for production and wealth creation above of wealth squandering and charity.. this is apparent in the incredible asset base Apple has built up and his quote regarding charity from the Playboy interview:

“In order to lean how to do something well you have to fail sometimes…the problem with most philanthropy-there’s no measurement system..you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded. So it’s really hard to get better.”

I’m quite sure Steve Jobs did not hate the state on a principled basis as did Murray Rothbard, after all through IP action he did benefit in some cases from the state. Rather if you listen to what he said in his life, quotes like “think different”, “stay foolish”, to me Steve Jobs was like a real life Howard Roark, despite no prinicpled objection to the state Jobs probably saw himself as a “prime mover”, given this it would only follow that he’d hold a certain disdain for the state and all other elements of society that destroy his vision. Though fortunately he never dynamited Apple he was never afraid to swiftly axe poor products, as he famously advised the Nike CEO, “get rid of the crappy stuff”.

Whatever the case he was someone who truly lived outside of the status quo and fortunately for the world did not let the “statist quo” (to quote Tucker) stand in his way either.

You know, I’ve stayed inactive here for a while for this whole cult of personality thing to die down, but this is getting ridiculous. Steve Jobs anti-state because he has no license plate? Don’t go reading into this, the man is turning into a religious prophet by the day. The fact he managed to get away with it for all those years without it being constantly towed to the impound lot probably says more about his influence with government as opposed to his hatred of it. The local cops know the car and wouldn’t dare put a ticket in it for lacking the proper tags like the rest of us schmucks would have to deal with. He’s more of a 60′s liberal – government is fine and dandy, so long as it doesn’t apply to me.

Just ask yourself this – is a friend of liberty and freedom going to run a company whose main response to competition is not to produce a better product, but to get the government to ban the competitor? You can’t say Jobs was powerless against his legal department when they convinced the European Union to ban competing tablet computers from entering the continent or when they decided to micromanage what Microsoft was and wasn’t allowed to sell with their operating system.

I get it, you like his phone and music player, great. They didn’t change society or provide countless work opportunities – the technology world owes that to Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who basically enabled us to communicate like this) and Linus Torvalds (the guy who started the momentum on the OS that runs this website server and most computerized manufacturing machines the world over). But Steve Jobs the man is beneath idolization at the Mises Institute. At best, he has done nothing for the causes we believe in. At worst, he’s been an active enemy of our cause. Given how secretive he’s been and I’m only able to get proxy attitudes via how Apple the company operated under his command, he’s somewhere in the middle. A minor foe of liberty, but not one big enough to make a big deal about.

I’m going to vanish for a while longer while this site sorts its priorities out and comes to its senses.