My son’s iPhone landed in a bucket of water recently, and please don’t ask how… Nevertheless, I wound up at my local “Apple Store” for the first time and was stunned by the size of the crowd. It looked like they were giving away Springsteen tickets, (not that I would want any). After being afforded a place in line even though I bungled the reservation portion of my visit, the representatives were exceedingly professional and the service unequaled. I left a very satisfied customer and with a peculiar sense of pride in the story of this great company. Admittedly I was not always a fan. But the synergy and compatibility factors I’ve enjoyed using Apple products have made me a believer. This is almost an oddity it seems as most Apple users identify as Liberal and Android users as Conservative. That night I began to think about Apple Inc. in terms of recent financial news concerning the computer and cell-phone giant.
Steve Jobs was not a Conservative to be sure. But he was a masterful businessman who understood his trade and the free market economy which clearly facilitated his company’s meteoric rise. I’ve watched “Apple” in one form or another from its inception in the 1970’s, and even argued the case for PC over MAC when I was younger and “less practical”. But it wasn’t until the interaction between Jobs and President Obama, as well as Jobs’ passing that I began to understand the “politics of Apple”.
Inevitably, a business started in the family garage and which now boasts 73 percent of every profit dollar as capital in the form of spendable cash, definitely has the government’s full attention. In the case of the current Administration, they could certainly take a page from that success and apply it to their own failures, sort of like economic penicillin to the infection of ideological stupidity. Apple clearly represents everything a true Liberal/Progressive hates, namely the entrepreneurial spirit and hard work which often results in the realization of one’s dreams and success in the private sector. Consequently, this has to explain recent Wall Street analysts cloak and dagger approach to Apple’s perceived market shakiness. Frankly, the idea that companies like Amazon are seen as good investment opportunities in spite of their lack luster profit performance is somewhat puzzling to me. It’s understood that a good investor is looking for growth potential as a reason to buy longer term, but it seems a company which repeatedly breaks profit margin records, and holds at least a 16-17 percent market share of a cell-phone product dominated in numbers by their competitors, wouldn’t be a bad choice either.
While this may not seem a post you would expect from someone who can’t even afford Apple stock, I believe it speaks to the bigger picture of what some see as the job killing/anti-business climate of the Obama Presidency. When a rock solid and truly profitable company doesn’t meet the overblown and manipulated issuances/speculations of some fast-talking office analyst, seeking only to validate a market propped up by tax payer “stimulus” and worthless government paper, it makes me wonder if some folks might not actually be rooting for Apple’s demise, worse yet the demise of individual success itself…
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