The cover story of Time ($$) this week discusses Apple and Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The basic frame of the article is that “Conventional wisdom says its strategy is wrong”, but then goes on to explain how its strategy has been working. The strategy referred to here is that Apple makes its own hardware, OS, apps and consumer-electrics devices (iPods).

Here is the bit relevant to economics:

Here we go again with “Make a Difference Day“—the 4th Saturday in October, which is tomorrow.

Last year on this site, I made an argument that generated more heat than I expected: “the most important difference making Americans ever encounter, hands down, no questions asked, occurs day in and day out in the marketplace.”

Reason # 6,231: For every $5 loaned by the Small Business Administration as part of the 9/11 recovery program, $1 is in default.

Ages ago, the great antitrust struggle in software was over Microsoft’s practice of tying its browser to its operation system. Also, there was an outcry among competitors (not consumers) over the zero price that MS was charging for IE. The great fear was that IE would have a complete monopoly on browsers and then...do something really terrible.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, — often the surfeit of our own behavior, — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. —William Shakespeare

As Chancellor, he may have been the man to derail the Thatcher Express - and so make RobespiBlaire possible — but maybe we can now forgive the often insufferable Nigel (now ‘Lord’) Lawson, in recognition of the service to rationality and objectivity contained in this congressional testimony on climate change. It certainly cuts to the heart of the EnviroFascists’ intellectual and scientific dishonesty — for example: 

Another accounting scandal has occurred, despite the existence of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which was signed into law by Bush to “prevent the next Enron.”