by Tom Pratt
The plan ended quickly, as Ivy Starnes laments, “In four years, a plan conceived, not by the cold calculations of the mind, but by the pure love of the heart, was brought to an end in the sordid mess of policemen, lawyers and bankruptcy proceedings.” (p. 323) The Starnes family has found its end with one survivor committing suicide, one a hopeless drunk living in a flophouse, and Ivy living in bitter resentment that her fellow human beings are such louts and greed-driven animals. What we know that others did not know, while the plan was in force, is that Ivy had a secret trust fund that no one could touch, and she now lives off the pittance it ends up providing.
At the end of her quest to find someone who can work on the motor invented by the unknown genius and hero of the plot, Dagny rides in her personal rail car back toward the east mulling the disaster stalking the country. A tramp is discovered hidden in the baggage area of the car by a conductor who attempts to boot him off at a stop. Dagny intervenes and offers a meal at her own table to the tramp and engages him in conversation. He has been wandering the country working at various jobs, though he is by trade a skilled lathe operator. He is clearly hopeless but unable to simply accept his fate, because as he says, “I don’t think it will be any use. But there’s nothing to do in the East except sit under some hedge and wait to die. I don’t think I’d mind it much now, the dying. I know it would be a lot easier. Only I think that it’s a sin to sit down and let your life go, without making a try for it.” (p. 659) She sees in this statement a fundamental morality that jibes with her own life philosophy. Eager to know how he has been reduced to such a state, she elicits the story. Six thousand workers at Twentieth Century Motor Company voted to put in place a plan:
Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody—almost everybody—voted for it. We didn’t know. We thought it was good. No, that’s not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need. (pp. 660-661)
He continued:
None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut—because they made it sound like anyone who’d oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn’t we heard it all our lives—from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn’t we always been told that this was righteous and just? (p. 661)
As his tale continues he pours forth the saga of every attempt ever made to make such system work. If no one has a claim on his own earnings or productivity, then his only claim is His “need,” his “misery, his “pain.” “It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars—rotten, whining, sniveling beggars all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family’. (p. 662) If superior ability means others have a claim on that ability regardless of their own incompetence or laziness or ignorance or sloppiness or uncaring joviality or sheer cussedness, what will happen to those whose ability and drive and knowledge and ambition and energy make them superior as producers? If the community cannot afford to send all children to college, then no one can send his own. If everybody can’t be given a new suit, no one will. If everyone can’t be provided a medical procedure, no one will. He concludes:
What was it they’d always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who’d do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn’t it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who’d do the worst job possible. There’s no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off. (p. 663)
There is a morality here, of course. The tramp puts it in two parts. First, “We saw that we’d been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it—for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty.” (p. 665) Finally, “Love of our brothers? That’s when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man’s new shirt, for another’s wife’s hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job on their house—it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger.” (p. 665)
Just exactly what is greed? Oh well, who is John Galt?
Chapter 3 - The Guiltless Man
None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers, a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us. –Paul Ryan (2012) commenting on “The Life of Julia” portrayed in a campaign commercial.
Eugene Lawson ended up working for the government because he excused his own failure with the idea that a small enclave of generosity and selflessness could not survive in a sea of greed and profit-making. His activities in the upper Midwest of the US were “not my fault” because he had no control over the events and people around him. He and many others like him saw that it was government that had the real power to force the masses of people in the country and the world (for that is where the novel takes us) to live together in brotherhood and love (these words are constantly used to define what the political entrepreneurs envision). For their purposes to be accomplished, the public must be made to go along with the enslavement of productive people to the will of the governing elite. This involves two primary actions: (1) The majority of people must be made dependent upon governing authorities to feed, clothe, house, entertain, and motivate them. (2) The most productive and innovative, whose abilities provide the excess capital for distribution must be made to cooperate in apparent voluntary agreement with the process. To bring this about governmental authority must turn itself to the business of writing into law and, more importantly, promulgating through “directives” more and more measures that make more and more activity criminal. In the service of this process moreover it is necessary to (1) pervert the use of language (producing irrationality) and (2) constantly maneuver the public by declaring “emergencies” that demand ever more action. A group of Rand characters works assiduously at bringing this part of the plot to a boil.
Wesley Mouch, Top Co-ordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, is the prime mover in much of this activity. He got his position by posing as a lobbyist for the unsuspecting Hank Rearden. He is as incompetent at planning and managing economic activity for the government as he was previously in the private sector. He came from a family that had once been quite wealthy, that is, until Wesley was appointed to manage the financial affairs by an uncle who considered him to be less dangerous because of his lack of distinctive talent or intellect. He was recommended to Rearden when he failed to produce sales in the automobile business. James Taggart (more on him later) recommended him to the Bureau of Planning in exchange for double-crossing Rearden to the benefit of Orren Boyle, Rearden’s competitor in the steel industry, who had helped Taggart ruin one of his own competitors, Dan Conway. This is the landscape of the looter
s and moochers, all of whom pose to the public as benefactors of the “little guy.” They are in Rand’s terminology, “the aristocracy of pull.”
There is a “head of state,” generally referred to as Mr. Thompson, a kind of charismatic (not in a personal sense, but in his role as useful imagery for giving authority to laws and directives) figurehead who serves as the face of the real movers and shakers in the background. In terms of his actual skills and abilities, in Rand’s words,
He is a man who possessed the quality of never being noticed. In any group of three, his person became indistinguishable, and when seen alone it seemed to evoke a group of its own, composed of the countless persons he resembled. The country had no clear image of what he looked like: his photographs had appeared on the covers of magazines as frequently as those of his predecessors in office, but people could never be quite certain which photographs were his and which were pictures of “a mail clerk” or “a white-collar worker,” accompanying articles about the daily life of the undifferentiated—except that Mr. Thompson’s collars were usually wilted… Holding enormous official powers, he schemed ceaselessly to expand them, because it was expected of him by those who had pushed him into office. He had the cunning of the unintelligent and the frantic energy of the lazy. The sole secret of his rise in life was the fact that he was a product of chance and knew it and aspired to nothing else. (pp. 532-533)
Mr. Thompson is good at spitting out orders and delegating dirty work to others while he works with his advisors on speeches and ways to manipulate the attitudes of the public. Floyd Ferris is his philosophical advisor on the ways of manipulating the public. Fred Kinnan is at the table to be sure the unions of the country get what they “need” in the face of critical decisions forthcoming on who gets what out of a shrinking economic pie.
Above all, there is the arch-villain James Taggart. He is the brother of Dagny, heir to the fortune of the great Nat Taggart, builder of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad that Dagny runs while her brother seeks favors in Washington that will loot his competitors and creditors and curry power among the circle of those doing what they do “for the good of the people as a whole.” He is the secretive manipulator who thinks “making money” is about transferring it from someone else’s bank account to his via government regulation and taxation. He assumes that people like his sister and Hank Rearden and Ellis Wyatt and Francisco d’Anconia will go on indefinitely providing the financing for his shenanigans because that’s just what they do, “ruthlessly” creating wealth without thought of “others.” He could not begin to run a railroad or build a steel mill or exploit a copper mine or finance business through banking, but he prides himself in being high-minded and public spirited in his pursuit of dividing the shrinking wealth of the nation according to “need,” as long as Taggart Transcontinental is seen to be the neediest, because railroads are so essential to the “common people.”
The plot is moving along throughout the meetings and negotiations of these men toward the complete control of all economic activity, eventually embodied in Directive 10-289. They have decided that the condition of the country, and actually the world, is such that a complete standstill is necessary to “catch our breath.” What they mean by this is that all economic activity must be made to conform to the current status quo—no job switching, no new inventions, no price rises or cuts, same for wages, same for productivity. No one can quit a job, close a business, sell out, retire, or transfer assets. All trademarks, patents, copyrights, formulas, and inventions will be “voluntarily” surrendered to the government as “patriotic” gestures in light of the “emergency.” These will then be licensed to all equally under the same name and be sold as such. All corporations and individuals will be required to spend no more and no less than they have in the immediate past accounting period. All profits, dividends, interest rates, and gifts of whatever kind will be frozen at their current rates. Naturally there are unspecified penalties and fines and consequences for failure to conform to the directive and any disputes will be settled without benefit of appeal by the Unification Board. Oh, and taxes will not be frozen because they must be flexible for any contingency they have not anticipated. This is to be the “Age of Love,” where once there had been the “Age of Reason.” Eugene Lawson blurts out, “Those who’re big are here to serve those who aren’t. If they refuse to do their moral duty, we’ve got to force them. This is the day of the heart. It’s the weak, the meek, the sick and the humble that must be the only objects of our concern.” (p. 539). As the group which has met to approve and authorize this directive, realizing that the characters we have looked at in the previous chapter will be the actual objects of this tactic, Dr. Ferris summarizes eloquently the underlying philosophy:
There’s no such thing as the intellect. A man’s brain is a social product. A sum of influences that he’s picked up from those around him. Nobody invents anything, he merely reflects what’s floating in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual scavenger and a greedy hoarder of the ideas which rightfully belong to society, from which he stole them. All thought is theft. If we do away with private fortunes, we’ll have a fairer distribution of wealth. If we do away with genius, we’ll have a fairer distribution of ideas. (p. 540)
But it is Fred Kinnan, the labor leader, who explodes the myth of altruistic concern that is the façade of such a monstrosity as Directive 10-289. He insists that his position controls more quantity of force than the businessmen do. He has the numbers of the people supposed to receive benefits from this arrangement, and he is determined that the outcome will favor him and his constituency above all others. Eloquently he assures them that he knows what this game is about:
I know that I’m delivering the poor bastards into slavery, and that’s all there is to it. And they know it, too. But they know that I’ll have to throw them a crumb once in a while, if I want to keep my racket, while with the rest of you they wouldn’t have a chance in hell. So that’s why, if they’ve got to be under a whip, they’d rather I held it, not you—you drooling, tear-jerking, mealy-mouthed bastards of the public welfare! Do you think that outside of your college-bred pansies there’s one village idiot whom you’re fooling? I’m a racketeer—but I know it and my boys know it, and they know that I’ll pay off. Not out of the kindness of my heart, either, and not a cent more than I can get away with, but at least they can count on that much. Sure, it makes me sick sometimes, it makes me sick right now, but it’s not me who’s built this kind of world—you did—so I’m playing the game as you’ve set it up and I’m going to play it for as long as it lasts—which isn’t going to be long for any of us! (pp. 541-542)
As the discussion proceeds, despite the evident threat from Kinnan, it is agreed that they have forgotten to prepare for closing down all research facilities, development projects, scientific foundations, and anything that might change the look of the future. They can’t think about the future until everybody has received their fair share of the present—“Nobody should be allowed to waste money on the new until everybody has plenty of the old.” (p. 542) Finally, voicing a growing sense of need for self-justification in the room, James Taggart seals the deal:
“We need it. We need it, don’t we?” There was no answer. “We have the right to protect our livelihood!” Nobody opposed him, but he went on with a shrill, pleading, insistence. “We’ll be safe for the first time in centuries. Everybody will know his place and job, and everybody else’s place and job—and we won’t be at the mercy of every stray crank with a new idea. Nobody will push us out of business or steal our markets or undersell us or make us obsolete. Nobody will come to us offering some damn new gadget and putting us on the spot to decide whether we’ll lose our shirt if we buy it, or whether we’ll lose our shirt if we don’t but somebody else does! We won’t have to decide. Nobody will be permitted to decide anything. It will be decided once and for all. (p. 543)
His desperation continues in the interchange that follows as one and another respond with self
-justifying pabulum. Then Taggart utters what is at the heart of this evil:
Heroes? They’ve done nothing but harm, all through history. They’ve kept mankind running a wild race, with no breathing spell, no rest, no ease, no security. Running to catch up with them . . . always, without end . . . Just as we catch up, they’re years ahead. . . . They leave us no chance . . . They’ve never left us a chance. . . .” His eyes were moving restlessly; he glanced at the window, but looked hastily away: he did not want to see the white obelisk [the Washington Monument] in the distance. “We’re through with them. We’ve won. This is our age. Our world. We’re going to have security—for the first time in centuries—for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution!” (pp. 543-544)
This sobering cry from the ring-leader forces the conversation to tail off into tit-for-tat bargaining and wrangling that finally faces the ultimate question no one wants to face: How will they get Hank Rearden to “voluntarily” give up his patent on Rearden Metal so the state can make its formula available to all parties? It must be seen as voluntary by the public or they will likely rebel at it, but the conspirators are convinced he will not do so even at the point of a gun. He has demonstrated already that he understands their need for his voluntary action, and he refuses to go along to get along. As the conversation proceeds they isolate the reason: Rearden sees himself as guiltless in a world where they have been working assiduously at making all people bear a load of guilt for something, anything that will make them pliable to the state’s purposes. Dr. Ferris states the philosophical point: