Atlas Shrugged – Day 060 – pp. 659-668
So Dagny and the Tramp continue their conversation.
He tells her about his experience most recently at the Hammond Car Company. He waited nearly a year for the job. He got on just as Larry Hammond quit and disappeared. Then the G took over and he was one of the first to get the boot.
Then he tell of a place where he worked for 20 years. Until the owner died and the heirs took over. Could it be? Another visit from the “small world department?”
They throw out the “Who is John Galt” together.
The tramp doesn’t like the saying. Neither does Dagny. Wishes she knew who started it.
“That’s it ma’am. That’s what I’m afraid of. It might have been me who started it.”
“What?”
“Me or about six thousand others We might have. I think we did. I hope we’re wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
And then the tramp launches into his story of, yes, the Twentieth Century Motor Company.
When the kids took over the company, they called a meeting to lay out their plan of “from those according to their ability, to those according to their need.” Everyone in the plant voted for the plan. (They voted for the plan because none of them had the stones to stand up and say “this is freakin’ nuts!)
He tells the story of how quickly the workers learned that under this plan, they couldn’t have anything until everyone else had the same. And they’d have to work themselves to death until the other guy got his.
The only way to get anything was to lower your standard — become a miserable beggar.
Then production began to fall off. So then the most productive had to work overtime without pay to pick up the slack.
It brought out the absolute worst in everyone.
“God help us, ma’am! Do you see what we saw? 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.”
OK Dagny, now you’ve heard it from Francisco and from the tramp. Is it sinking in yet?
And the supposed love for their brothers the plan was to engender, was turning to hate.
And the rest is, of course history.
But this little description of demanding a trade of need for ability and the results it produces rang a scary bell for me today as I was reading the news.
I’ve been kind of commenting on how the larger sense within our country – from those in Washington – has turned into Rand’s worst nightmare. It seems to be worse.
“Ahead of a summit of the Group of 20 industrial and developing nations, which begins Thursday in Seoul, Mr. Obama also took a swipe at China as he escalated assertions that the Asian giant is artificially deflating the value of its currency to boost exports. He again made it clear that his emphasis at the G-20 would be curbing the massive trade surpluses of a handful of countries, such as China and Germany, so countries still struggling with high unemployment can boost their exports and job markets.”
That’s the POTUS reprimanding China for depressing their currency so they can export more to us than they import from us. A strategy that seems to interfere with the engineered plummet of our own dollar.
Now I’m not defending China’s managed economy. They manipulate as much, or more, than we do. All I’m trying to point out is, given our inability to effectively balance our trade deficit, B is demanding equality on the global stage. Have China act contrary to their own interests to serve ours.
My God! We’ve become the United States of Twentieth Century Motors.