Gary North (Lew Rockwell):

“By many accounts, Steve Jobs was a mean, ruthless SOB. He was the living incarnation of the opposite of those people who gave him his start in life, beginning with his parents, who sacrificed for his education.

That was the great tragedy of Steve Jobs. He was productive as few men ever are. He was driven internally – by what? – to serve customers well. As a driven man, he drove others. But at the start of his career were people who were not driven and who did not drive him. They let him follow his gut. They let him connect the dots at his leisure and their expense. Those forgotten people – unknown to us, but not by God – made possible his success.

Read the testimony again. Look for the central word.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

The central word is “I.” This was the paradox of Steve Jobs’ life. It was all “I,” yet to build up his own ego, he had to serve customers.

CONCLUSION

The free market made possible his economic success. The free society made possible his early life as a moocher. Voluntarism was at the heart of Steve Jobs’ success.

He absorbed others’ charity and returned the favor to others, not as charity, but as profit-seeking output. This economic system has made us all rich in the West, by any standard of pre-1850 comparison. As P. J. O’Rourke put it, “When you think of the good old days, think ‘dentistry.'”

The free market is a moral system, not because it makes men moral, but because it rewards those who serve others efficiently and penalizes those who don’t.

Steve Jobs’ personal characteristics in his economically productive years did not inspire the development of those virtues which had made his early years productive. In another economic system or social order, Steve Jobs would have made a first-class tyrant. He was far more Simon Legree than Uncle Tom. But the free market made him a giant”