Matthew Yglesias as Hater of the Productive (Steve Jobs Edition)

This is truly remarkable. Steve Jobs had a yacht constructed, which he never got to see fully completed because of his death, but Yglesias is bitching about the yacht as a proof of the problems with income inequality. He writes:

 Dutch blog One More Thing has photos of Steve Jobs' mega-yacht, designed by Phillipe Starck and only completed posthumously. It's a valuable reminder of the best argument for reducing economic inequality. 

Jobs is a good case for this precisely because he's widely acknowledged to be a good businessman. He didn't get rich running some kind of scam or exploiting regulatory arbitrage. From the Apple II to Pixar to the iPhone, Jobs made money by ushering into existence things that people wanted even more than they wanted money. It's a great story of entrepreneurship and capitalism. And yet at the end of the day what you have is an enormous boat with six iMacs on board. The absurdity of these watercraft and the fact that there's clearly a large positional element to the race to acquire them (the goal is to have the awesomest yacht in the marina not necessary to meet any absolute standard of yachtness) shows that beyond a certain point it becomes extremely difficult to transform additional money into additional happiness. 

As Brad DeLong writes "The time and energy and work devoted to making, toasting and serving a $40 bagel at the Four Seasons Hotel on 57th Street in Manhattan would, in a more equal America, buy a full dinner for four at Sizzler Steakhouse for a family to whom going to Sizzler is a once-a-month treat - and thereby produce more human happiness." 

By the same token, one man's super-yacht could have been more spacious accommodations for a dozen regular families.

So here's the damn bitch question to you Matty: If Jobs were alive today, would you mind that after you confiscated his boat, he took back all the Apple computers, iPhones, iPads and iPods manufactured because of his creativity, vision and drive?  You are a pure and simple hater, if you don't understand what Jobs delivered to those much less wealthy than him. Yeah, you can probably make the world more "equal," by confiscating Jobs' boat, but what you are really doing is suffocating the drive of others, which will result in less incentive for the future Steve Jobs-types.

I guess that we should all be grateful that Yglesias was not somehow a government power player after Jobs launched the Apple computer, long before iPhones, iPads and iPods. Would the great confiscator have decided that Jobs was too unequal after the money he made from the Apple computer and confiscate so much of his wealth that Jobs stopped producing and none of us would benefit from the many future products he produced.