by Tom Pratt
Chapter 2 - The Utopia of Greed
The reader of Atlas Shrugged is continually faced with characterizations and settings in which the language of ordinary discourse is molded and shaped by the various available forms of double entendre. We do not mean by this the usual vulgar sexual innuendo. Rather the issue of the uses and abuses of language seem always to be at the front of verbal exchanges. “Greed” is one of those words bandied about to describe behaviors as diverse as making profits on sales of essential commodities and complaining about high taxes. The 1980s have been labeled in many parts of the left-leaning media and intelligentsia as a “decade of greed.” It was so designated because it was the time of the massive recovery from recession and inflationary misery of the Carter years that followed upon the reduction of marginal tax rates under Ronald Reagan. It was predicted prior to these reductions in rates (not reductions in taxes paid) that actual collections would go up and the business community would have great incentives to invest and build their businesses and employ American citizens in profitable enterprises, thus advancing the collection of taxes and diminishing the need for government services. Anyone who studies the government’s accounting of tax collections during that period will see that this is exactly what happened.[18] However, if one looks at deficit spending for the same period, a strange picture emerges. Deficits were in fact higher at the end of the decade than at the beginning. How so? The Congress of the US managed to piggy-back spending increases one after another on each other until they succeeded in outspending tax collections despite their record revenue collections. A segment of the political community of the nation continues to point to this phenomenon of increased deficits as a mark of the “greed” of “rich” Americans who “paid less taxes” even though they were making huge profits. The truth is that Americans of all economic levels paid more in taxes than they had ever done before and made more in profits and wages than ever before. However, those committed to redistributing the money of others to constituent groups found reason in this case to label the decade of prosperity “greedy” because people wished to retain control of their own money while others clamored to be cut in on the largesse through governmental distribution programs. This is the classic case of turning the use of language upside-down for the sake of moral posturing and the demonizing of an easy target—the “rich.” The appropriate question to ask, the one that examines the premises of the charge, is this: If it is “greedy” to want to hold on to what one has productively and lawfully acquired, what is the designation of the desire to have that which another has so earned?[19]
Ayn Rand and her heroes of all stripes and levels of accomplishment proudly wear the badge given them by societal fasciste whose trade is in abuse of the language for the purpose of manipulation of a dense Kultursmog that obscures, to the unthinking, what is truly afoot.[20] If it is “greedy” to want to control one’s own productivity, let them call me greedy. Midas Mulligan (Rand’s “heroic” banker) legally changed his first name from Mike to Midas when he was ridiculed in the media (a reporter began to call him Midas, and it went viral) for making money in banking by supposedly turning everything he touched to gold. The secret, he said, is knowing what to touch. Hank Rearden proudly states that he expects to make a large pile of money off his metal alloy, named egotistically (so the public said) “Rearden metal,” without reference to whether it is “for the common good” or not. Dagny Taggart reacts in stupefied silence to charges that she is “conceited,” though she never mentions her own abilities or achievements, and “selfish,” though she has no idea what adults (for she is just a teenager) meant by the terminology and can find no one to define it for her (p. 51, Centennial Edition). Francisco D’Anconia clarifies the whole situation in a series of hammer blows, spoken to Hank Rearden (p. 454):
You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called antisocial for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who’ve expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who’ve created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who’ve kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a “vulgar materialist.”
And, of course, John Galt in the book’s longest speech declares where this abuse of language must end (p. 1029):
If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: “What is the good?”—the only answer you will find is “The good of others.” The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’ is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others—all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the “non-good for me.”
Part of Rand’s literary art is to play on this corruption of the language and use it with rapier precision to eviscerate the philosophy of popular altruism. In this spirit she names the eventual destination of the “men and women of the mind” who have been disappearing from public life throughout the book. Two-thirds of the way along we find them, “accidentally,” in a place she labels with our chapter title, but which is actually known affectionately among the occupants as Galt’s Gulch. It is a place where they have gone one by one to await the collapse of the system that can only treat them as pariahs and scavenge from their wealth and creativity. Once a year they gather for a month to escape the chaos of the outside world and contemplate in fraternal fellowship the future and the work they love, sharing its fruits with the others at incredibly low prices. A concert by a world-renowned composer Richard Halley is priced at a dime or a quarter, the same for a lecture by the philosopher Hugh Akston or a performance by the acclaimed actress Kay Ludlow but a course in physics by John Galt costs $10. The pricing is astronomical, though it seems to be trivial, for the only denomination of exchange is gold (silver for small change) from Midas Mulligan’s bank. For the same exchange rate Dagny Taggart is hired by John Galt as a housekeeper and cook during the month of her forced stay—for she has “crashed the party” and will not be allowed out till the month is over. During that month she refuses to be a moocher on their system and works for $5, payable from Mulligan’s bank in gold. As the inhabitants of the valley put it, “Only objective values count here.”
One by one the characters let us know why they have gone on strike, depriving the world of the “profits” that exercising their minds would bring to the world. Those who still remain outside through each year have pledged not to exert themselves beyond the physical labor to take care of their immediate needs, refusing to let the world benefit from the overflow of the ability of their minds and what they produce. In this way they expect to “stop the motor of the world” as the world at large collapses from the weight of its own greed and envy. By this time the collapse is well under way and only two targets remain for Galt to recruit to the valley--Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. They remain unconvinced by Galt’s argument because they cannot bear to watch what they have built over the years fall finally into the possession of those too lazy and ignorant and uproductive (besides outright evil) to even maintain the remains. During the month of her sojourn in the utopia of greed, Galt’s G
ulch, Hank Rearden is searching frantically for her daily in a search for her downed plane in the Rocky Mountains, even as political authorities mislead the public as to her whereabouts, reassuring them that she will return.
Each character tells us something about their own struggle to leave the world that is falling apart in favor of the valley bought by Midas Mulligan for this purpose. Hugh Akston refuses to work in a profession that denies the very existence of the thing it is supposed to specialize in knowing—the truth as perceived by the intellect of man. Mulligan states his case for “love” as the recognition one grants to “superlative values” and the reason he is on strike. Judge Narragansett quit when his ruling in a case, involving Midas Mulligan’s bank (its attempt to collect a debt) and a loan coerced by government rules to be made to unqualified borrowers, was overturned in favor of the “need” of the plaintiffs rather than the rule of law. He stated the problem like this:
Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept. Now I saw that one man was to be bound by it, but the other was not, one was to obey a rule, the other was to assert an arbitrary wish—his need—and the law was to stand on the side of the wish. Justice was to consist of upholding the unjustifiable. I quit—because I could not have borne to hear the words “Your Honor” addressed to me by an honest man. (p. 743)
Richard Halley quit writing music for the public because, after suffering for years with no monetary success or public acknowledgement, when he finally experienced approval from the public it was as though they had no appreciation of the struggle he had endured or its reason—that he had something within himself to express for its own sake that did not need their approval to be valid and good. He says, “I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan’s money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to self-esteem by extorting from me the admission that they were the goal of my music.” (p. 743) Dr. Hendricks quit when medicine was put under state control to be rationed out by bureaucratic fiat and political maneuvering. “I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward.” (p. 744) Ellis Wyatt the oil man quit because “I didn’t wish to serve as the cannibals’ meal and to do the cooking, besides.” (p. 744)
Kay Ludlow, renowned actress, quit and in the Gulch works in the cafeteria and is married to the pirate raider Ragnar Danneskjold (scion of a European family, who raids the shipments of governments and “looters” to return unjust income tax collections to Rand’s heroes). She will no longer perform for the outside world because, “Whatever quality of human greatness I have the talent to portray—that was the quality the outer world sought to degrade. They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity. They used my talent—for the defamation of itself. That was why I quit.” (p. 784) An unnamed mother of two children has chosen to join her husband in the valley (for no one can force another to go on strike) because her children “represent my particular career…They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world.” (p. 785) She goes on:
I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational. (p. 785)
And another unnamed woman is the “fishmonger” of the valley. She supplies fish from the streams to Hammond’s Market (Hammond himself a striker who made the finest of automobiles in the outside world). In the world of the looters she was (and still is here) a writer whom no one would publish because she believes that “when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.”
All of these and others have gone on strike by vowing to refrain from doing anything beyond supporting themselves and their immediate families/dependents--until the world wakes up to its mad mania for other people’s money and productivity--except what they do in the valley of Mulligan and Galt which benefits others with the same values as theirs.
The valley itself is powered by the motor (the greatest secret of the utopia of greed) that John Galt invented and refused to have co-opted by a vicious and covetous cadre of workers and owners at a now-defunct manufacturing plant, the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Dagny and Hank Rearden find the partially completed motor on a pile of abandoned junk in the hulking shell of the once proud facility. It is the source of an ongoing quest to find its inventor, and that quest leads to Galt’s Gulch and, along the way, the cast of characters involved in the demise of the Motor Company. Along the way we meet Eugene Lawson, a man who claims he never made a profit in his entire business life as a banker (Community National Bank, inherited from what he considered to be his “greedy” forebears), whose motto was “need not greed,” is now a successful political entrepreneur (he is a government regulator of sorts) who once loaned money to the owners of the Motor Company and then lost everything in the crash of his bank. Lee Hunsacker, who ran Twentieth Century into the ground and condemns the likes of Midas Mulligan for not having the altruism to loan him money without collateral or experience running a business, is now a whining charity case who lives off “friends” and resents needing to help around the house, because his “autobiography” is going to be such a success “if anyone ever gives me a chance.” Midas Mulligan refused this man a loan because he violated the Mulligan standard: The man who is more evil than the one who has no pity in his heart is, “The man who uses another’s pity for him as a weapon.”[21]
Hunsacker makes an important point in the development of the philosophical plot, when he condemns Midas Mulligan for refusing him and his cohorts a loan:
“Midas Mulligan was a vicious bastard with a dollar sign stamped on his heart,” said Lee Hunsacker, in the fumes of the acrid stew. “My whole future depended upon a miserable half-million dollars, which was just small change to him, but when I applied for a loan, he turned me down flat—for no better reason than that I had no collateral to offer. How could I have accumulated any collateral, when nobody had ever given me a chance at anything big? Why did he lend money to others, but not to me? It was plain discrimination. He didn’t even care about my feelings—he said that my past record of failures disqualified me for ownership of a vegetable pushcart, let alone a motor factory. What failures? I couldn’t help it if a lot of ignorant grocers refused to co-operate with me about the paper containers. By what right did he pass judgment on my ability? Why did my plans for my own future have to depend upon the arbitrary opinion of a selfish monopolist? I wasn’t going to stand for that. I brought suit against him.” (p. 317)
The resulting suit was the case that made Judge Narragansett quit because an emergency government rule was invoked that forced him into a decision he found unconscionable. Hunsacker goes on:
It was an economic emergency law which said that people were forbidden to discriminate for any reason whatever against any person in any matter involving his livelihood. It was used to protect day laborers and such, but it applied to me and my partners as well, didn’t it? So we went to court, and we testified about the bad breaks we’d all had in the past, and I quoted Mulligan saying that I cou
ldn’t even own a vegetable pushcart, and we proved that all the members of the Amalgamated Service Corporation had no prestige, no credit, no way to make a living—and, therefore, the purchase of the motor factory was our only chance of livelihood—and, therefore, Midas Mulligan had no right to discriminate against us—and, therefore, we were entitled to demand a loan from him under the law. (pp. 317-318)
Twentieth Century Motor Company was owned by the Starnes family when its new regime of business and work was introduced. Ivy Starnes, in a pitiful hovel along the Mississippi River in Louisiana where she went to escape the crash of her family’s business, explains:
My father was an evil man who cared for nothing but business. He had no time for love, only for money. My brothers and I lived on a different plane. Our aim was not to produce gadgets, but to do good. We brought a great, new plan into the factory. It was eleven years ago. We were defeated by the greed, the selfishness and the base, animal nature of men. It was the eternal conflict between spirit and matter, between soul and body. They would not renounce their bodies, which was all we asked of them. I do not remember any of those men. I do not care to remember. . . . The engineers? I believe it was they who started the hemophilia. . . . Yes, that is what I said: the hemophilia—the slow leak—the loss of blood that cannot be stopped. They ran first. They deserted us, one after another . . . Our plan? We put into practice that noble historical precept: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. (pp. 322-323)
The plan had every person from top to bottom of the scale making the same salary. Then each year, twice a year, they would meet altogether to vote on special “needs” and assess penalties for those not deemed to have done work to the best of their ability (this is called “taxing the rich” in current vernacular, that is, punish the most productive). She continues, “Rewards were based on need, and the penalties on ability. Those whose needs were voted to be the greatest, received the most. Those who had not produced as much as the vote said they could, were fined and had to pay the fines by working overtime without pay. That was our plan. It was based on the principle of selflessness. It required men to be motivated, not by personal gain, but by love for their brothers.” (p. 323)[22] The day the plan was adopted John Galt quit and vowed to stop the motor of the world. The next day the head of the experimental lab, William Hastings, quit and moved to Wyoming, eventually becoming one of the yearly visitors to Galt’s Gulch after working mostly as a mechanic for a small motor company for several years.