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.
I suppose we should just fire all the people that make yachts. Who cares if they can't find other jobs, right? Equality above sanity makes EVERYONE poorer.
ReplyDeleteAlmost managed to shut down the yacht industry with luxury taxes. We could try that again.
DeleteYeah, some nice jobs for a group of people doing stuff that was probably something to be proud of, in the making of the yacht.
DeleteI bet if you looked into it..there was probably a reason why those jobs were in The Netherlands, not in California?
http://lewrockwell.com/williams-w/w-williams92.1.html
DeleteYglesias is simply the R. Foster Winans of his day. These guys live paycheck to paycheck chronicling the comings and goings of the productive sector and try to fit in in their threadbare blue blazers and discount haircuts. Few of them ever grasp the good that most of their subjects do relative to the humble journalist offerings that they themselves churn out as regularly as your average prune-fed sloth.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that he is a hater. It's just that nobody should ever use money to make/do things that Matthew Yglesias disapproves of.
ReplyDeleteWe all need to check with him first.
More human happiness? It's difficult enough to measure the relative happiness of one person in different situations; it's impossible to compare the relative happiness of two people in different situations. Quite a tenuous foundation for a policy advocating widespread plunder.
ReplyDeleteYglesias should just quit. He sucks at life.
ReplyDeleteI guess the cliches are true. Within every progressive resides a dormant Marxist who hates it when consumers give more of their money to people like Jobs, than to pundits like Yglesias.
ReplyDeleteAnother example of Hayek's critique of social justice - rather distributive justice he considered meaningless. Even if central planners rewarded Yglesias his own yacht and attendant rewards, others would soon jump on Yglesias claiming social justice reducing his rewards thereby destroying the essential signalling function of the market and making decent government impossible.
ReplyDeleteHey wait! Hasn't that already happened?
What are the chances he wrote the whole stupid article on a Mac computer?
ReplyDeleteEven the alleged Brad DeLong theory is wrong: we can bet the owners and the servers at the Sizzler Steakhouse would rather get paid $40 for a bagel (all else being unchanged) than having to produce a full dinner for four in order to earn that same $40. It's not at all clear the bagel transaction is producing less happiness or happy people than the full dinner transaction.
ReplyDeleteMatt Who? He must write for Slate or Huffington Post. No longer care how this crowd thinks
ReplyDeleteDoes this bozo realize that the income gap between himself and billions of people on earth is enormous? I highly doubt he would like if someone stole his shit and gave it to the poorest of the poor around the globe.
ReplyDeleteOf course he wouldn't. Hypocrisy is the lifeblood of socialists like him.
DeleteI hope Mr. Wenzel would put up some sort of challenge to Yglesias.
DeleteIt was revealed he makes $80,000 a year
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/slate-hires-matthew-yglesias-dismissing-writing-twitter-231446176.html
1.1 billion live on less than $1 a day ($365 a year). What has Yglasias done to relieve this income gap? Why isnt he calling for his income to be taxed at higher rates to help truly poor people?