Blodget's walk of shame
Blodget: Steve Jobs didn’t create jobs, customers did. In Blodgett’s world, the creative force in employment is people who consume things. Steve Jobs created something that no one knew was needed – the iPad, for instance, but that produced no jobs. Only when consumers came out of the woodwork to buy what hadn’t existed before were factories manned and set to work.
And what if the iPad was not invented? What would those factories be producing for Blodget’s millions of consumers? He doesn’t say.
He does say,however, in an eerie echo of the looters in Atlas Shrugged, that inventors and entrepreneurs, useless though they be, can be taxed as heavily as the non-producers see fit because these people will keep inventing, keep being creative because – well, just because.
Blodget is creating something new here himself, a sort of ill-thought-out post-Marxism. Marx argued that it was factory workers, not capitalists, that create surplus value or, if you will, “wealth”. Blodget tosses those workers into the dustbin of history and posits that it is consumers purchasing what the factories and their workers produce that actually generate wealth. By this logic, we could confiscate every dollar earned by capitalists, inventors and assembly line workers redistribute that money to the worthless non-working surplus population and make everyone a millionaire through the increased spending of the food stamp horde. That may work for Mr. Blodget but not so well, I think, in a real world.
To his credit, Blodget did seem to attempt to prove his new theory by committing several felonies and, had he consented to go to jail, would have created jobs, and wealth, for a handful of prison guards. That he dodged that fate via plea bargain is sensible but hardly a testament to his willingness to help the poor.
The man’s an idiot, a looter and a thief, and in general, a very bad person. May he and his like keep the Devil’s minions employed for eternity.
