In the 1981-86 period I was one of the U.S. government's top trade negotiators, especially with Japan. At that time, Apple was trying to crack the Japanese market for personal computers and getting nowhere. Steve Jobs and other Apple executives had the funny notion that the U.S. government had an obligation to help them and asked me and other negotiators at the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to help them get on the shelf in Japan.
Apple's products still have a large U.S. government R&D content and I'll bet that the guy who says Apple has no obligation to help Uncle Sam does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple's intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use supply chains that stretch through a number of countries such as China and Japan between which there are long standing and bitter animosities.
And those supply chains. Are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment's notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies and of most Asian economies? It's the latter, of course. Apple is not the pinnacle of capitalism. It's the pinnacle of the marriage of Silicon Valley innovation with strategic Asian mercantilism.
I'm amazed at the one way thinking of many U.S. corporate types as revealed in the article. In several places, it states that America no longer produces the kind of workers with the kind of skills necessary to run the kinds of factories and supply chains that operate now in Asia. But the truth is more nearly the opposite. It's because the companies are moving the jobs overseas that no Americans are learning the necessary skills. This is true for two reasons. One is that Americans are generally not stupid and recognize that because of off-shoring there won't be any those kinds of jobs and thus there is no sense in learning the skills necessary to do them. The second is that most of this kind of job or skill training occurs on the job, and if there are no jobs then there will be no skills.
The full article is available here
