Two interesting news items coincided the other week
Two interesting news items coincided the other week. The growing debate about the relatively light tax burden shouldered by the massively rich and the partial retirement of Steve Jobs.
One dog failed to bark in the night. No one, as far as I can see, dared name Mr Jobs as one of the people who should pay more tax. In fact, for a billionaire head of a vast, powerful US multinational, Jobs has enjoyed a special indulgence: to some people his is almost the only acceptable face of capitalism.
Will Wilkinson, blogging for the Economist, suggests people are dazzled by the beauty he has created. An urban liberal consensus has no trouble loving an egotistical, wholly unphilanthropic billionaire capitalist, provided he has great design sense. But ‘…the guys who get rich digging oil out of the ground so we can charge our iPhones? Stick it to ’em, the greedy bastards.’
Do read his post. It’s worth it for one sentence alone in which he describes our beloved iPads as providing ‘an escapist sense of versatile efficacy that is no less powerful for being fantasy’. Ouch. But surely our delusions aren’t confined to Apple products. Are we in fact overindulgent towards technology in general?
In the tangible world, when a large American cinema chain arrives in the UK and causes small local cinemas to close, a certain sort of person (though not me — I love a good multiplex) regards it as self-evidently bad. Yet when Amazon or iTunes jeopardises our high-street book or record shops, there is far less criticism.
As an Americanophile libertarian nutter, I don’t often agree with this dissenting Luddite chatter — and in any case, I can barely hear it over the Dolby 7.1
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