Atlas Shrugged – Day 088 – pp. 942-951
…And without the necessary transportation in MN, the shit starts flying.
“…farmers who had waited in the streets of Lakewood for six days with no place to store their wheat . . . had demolished the local courthouse. . . While the flour mills and grain markets of the country were screaming over the phones and telegraph wires. . .”
Dagny and Eddie worked round the clock to get any transportation to MN. It wasn’t enough.
By the time the Washington boys heard about it, it was too late. They had carried on until the last minute thinking…
“…there’s nothing to worry about. Those Taggart people have always moved that wheat on schedule, they’ll find someway to move it!”
Of course when the request for army troops to quell the riots hit, Wesley Mouch issued 3 directives to send all train cars to MN.
The whole thing’s breaking down. Hank Rearden sat at his desk realizing the farm equipment manufacturers would now never be paid. And neither would he.
And the train cars?
“The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country; it had been reaped prematurely, in was moldy and unfit for consumption.”
(Rand is, of course, recycling Bastiat’s broken window theory.)
Can it get any worse?
On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in NYC, in the underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights of the signals.”
Cut to Dagny at dinner in the Wayne Falkland Hotel. Dinner?
She’s been summoned to a meeting to the brain trust of the looters. Initially she thinks that maybe they’ve seen the light. That the plague they’ve infected the country with has spread so far, so fast that they’re willing to take whatever medicine necessary to stop the spread.
Nuh-uh.
The meeting is to “officially” plan the closing of the Taggart MN line. They feel her presence will be a “condoning” factor.
The looters thought is that they can maintain the rest of the country, if they shut down MN. Too much to lose out west.
Dagny interjects.
“Is it economics you’re talking about? . . . If it is, then give us leeway to save the Eastern states. That’s all that’s left of the country. . . Let us shrink back to the start of this country but let us hold that start.”
Actually, that’s what I was thinking. All the industry is out east. She says the agriculture in the west could be handled manually for years. (Well, maybe.) But the industry would be disastrous to lose.
Of course, she’s pretty much talking to herself.
Then the Cuffy-man chimes in with what may be the real reason they need the transcontinental track.
“With trouble and riots everywhere, you won’t be able to keep people in line unless you have transportation — troop transportation — unless you hold your soldiers within a few days’ journey of any point on the continent.”
Martial law. Beautiful.
Then Dagny sees their motive more clearly than ever…
“She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be questioned by anyone; she had thought that these mens urge to expropriate the factories of others was their acknowledgment of the factories value . . . what these men knew in their secret furtive souls. . . that so long as men struggle to stay alive they’ll never produce so little but that the man with the club would be able to seize it and leave them still less, . . . that the harder their work and the less their gain the more submissive the fiber of their spirit.”
They want to enslave the population. Yeeeeeow!
She gets an emergency about the signals from the station which she gladly runs off to handle.
In the cab to the station, she has yet another moment of doubt. She asks why she’s doing it all? What’s in it for her? And dismisses the thought reassuring herself that it’s all for the right reasons.
Back at the terminal, she meets with the crew.
She calls the President of the Atlantic Southern and asks to borrow his chief signal engineer for a day. Any cost. She’ll handle all the details. And at that point she has another realization.
“Not a single mind left on the Taggart Transcontinental…”
We’re gonna send a wrecker out to the Hudson line and tear down all the copper we can. How are we going to do that with all the signals down?
Follow me…