Capitalism. Don't blame the snake for being a snake.

Our kids are putting on warpaint and occupying everything except public restrooms. Good for them. May they speed the change we all need. We seem to have a hard time agreeing on what the change ought to be, though. 

I can't tell you what they think it's about, because they prefer hand signals to political manifestos. But I can tell you what it should be about: fences.

One could read news stories about the Occupants and conclude that they categorically hate capitalism, and indeed I'm sure that many of them do … while they snuggle in their North Face tents and download podcasts of the revolution on their iDevices, all made possible by the miracle of capitalism and corporate America.

These aren't stupid people. They know the irony. And they know that capitalism is the worst economic system in the world, except for all the others.

Capitalism is the rattlesnake in the garden. In the wild, it lives to kill. You cannot make pet of it. It will kill you. 

At the same time, there is no more efficient way of ridding your garden of gophers, rabbits, moles and rats, so you and the snake can grow fat and happy. If only you could keep it fenced in the garden, focused on killing rodents, and out of the house, where it will bite your baby.

You can't do this with snakes, but, good news, you can do it with banks, stock exchanges, corporations and all the other capitalist animals we live with and thrive upon. We used to know this, but we seem to have lost our way.

Unregulated, capitalism will do what it is programmed to do: turn resources into money, ruthlessly and efficiently.  And it is indeed the most efficient way in history to put food on our table, shiny cars in the driveway, big screen TVs on the wall and interesting stuff to watch when we're done working for the day.

If money were all there is to health and happiness, capitalism would always be a benign and useful process. But what the Occupants are saying is that we aren't made of money. We are human beings that need healthy food, shelter, clean air and water to thrive. For capitalism, those things are byproducts; the bait that's used to extract money from us and recycle into more capital. And the ruthless efficiency of the process can have unintended consequences, like cancer. Poisoned air and water. Climate damage. Toxic mortgages. 

Regulations are the fence we use to keep the process focused on protecting our health and welfare, instead of preying upon us. They put real price tags on activities like gas and oil drilling, so that when the shit happens, we can afford to clean it up. They keep activities like power generation from fouling the air and costing the rest of us billions in extra health care. And they keep banks from predatory activities like gambling with our pensions and loan sharking our home mortgages.

A few decades ago, the folks who had the most to gain from unfettered capitalism took down the fences. They rolled back the regulations that kept banks and investment firms from preying on a market of unsuspecting consumers. They made a fortune. And then you know what happened.

There are folks who want to blame consumers for letting themselves get bitten. Fair enough, but the problem is, if these folks don't recover, we all take the hit. Our jobs disappear, our homes lose value, our cities decline. We can't build a future without a healthy consumer class.

Don't blame them. And don't blame the system. 

Fix it.

Thank the Russians for your iPad. Without them there may not have been a Steve Jobs.

I can't wait to read the Steve Jobs biography coming out. I'm a slobbering fan. I still bleed in six colors, even though they changed the logo long ago.

But I'm looking for more than an Apple fix and some juicy details about the private life of an amazing innovator. I'm looking for some dots to connect, a back story, something that may just be between the lines, but should be there nevertheless. I'm looking for how Cupertino made Steve Jobs what he was.

Why should anyone care about that? Because that little town is the home of one of the world's great innovation stories. It's one place where there are jobs and growth. And boy, do we as a nation need to clone that formula for success.

Innovation may not be the magic cure for all of our problems right now, but it sure beats the hell out of whatever comes second. Innovation is the real job creator. Apple's innovations have created and changed entire markets. And in a world that can copy a new idea in six months and put it on the market for a dime on the dollar, Appe-style innovation is the best chance an American business has of staying ahead.

So what does that have to do with Cupertino?

I lived there in the late sixties, along with Steve, in the early days of Silicon Valley. It was just before the apricot and cherry orchards began to give way to microchip plants. During the packing season, the air before dawn would be thick with the smell of a million prunes cooking down at the Mariani plant not far from my house.

But even we kids knew this was changing. We learned it in school. Our school buildings were new and shiny. Our teachers were smart, engaging, competitive. Our science classes were off the charts. We had labs capable of cold fusion, even in junior high. The community was energized with math and science competitions, chess clubs, foreign language fairs, you name it. These things  were creating the culture of knowledge and innovation that have made Silicon Valley and Apple Computer icons of successful innovation in the decades since.

The reason? This is where the Russians come in.

Flash back ten years to 1958. In the midst of the Cold War, the Russians (or the Soviets, as we used to call them) put the first artifical satellite into space. It had the cute name Sputnik. It left the United States feeling stunned and whipped. And then galvanized … the space race was on.

The government poured money into communities around country to develop engineering centers to meet the Soviet challenge. Cupertino was lucky enough to have a huge naval air station, left over from the days of dirigibles, within its boundaries … land that the US Government decided would make for a great lab for testing spaceships. The NASA Ames Research Center was born.

The engineers and scientists who came to Cupertino brought families, and those families needed schools. And those schools had better be up to the standards of rocket scientist parents. So the community invested in eduction to make sure that they were.

Steve's parents weren't rocket scientists. Neither were mine. But kids like us thrived in the Cupertino schools. They went on to become scientists, engineers, mathmaticians, teachers and managers. The perfect workforce for an exploding technology industry.

So when Steve found himself innovating in Cupertino, he found himself surrounded by people like partner Steve Wozniak, who  knew how to turn big dreams into chips-and-wires reality. Cupertino in those days was a primordial soup for innovation. It provided the kind of synaptic connections that gave a dreamer like Steve Jobs arms, legs and wings.

Thanks to the eduation system. Thanks in turn to the educational money pumped in by the local, state and federal governments. And thanks to the kick in the ass from the Soviets.

Those are the dots I'll be looking to connect when I get my copy of the Jobs biography. My family moved from Cupertino after a few years there to another town, without the same urgency and the same educational spark. The difference was palpable, even to us kids.

Today, Apple is still innovating in Cupertino. But for how long? And how many others are there? And what Sputnik moments are there to inspire and challenge us to lead?

Today we argue about how much to spend on paying our teachers, equipping our schools, caring for and protecting our communities, as if those things were an expense, not an investment.

There was a time when we thought different. We should do so now.