[The following is a guest post by Ganzir and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person]

Source from where I got Atlas Shrugged and all quotations from it in this article: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.458873

“When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.”

“The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth: the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.”

Ayn dear, if I were paid for all the productive genius which made that factory possible, I would need to spend a lot less time pushing levers and have a lot more time to spend denouncing you.

No, I would never dare to claim that the size of my paycheck was created solely by my physical labor, but neither should Hank Rearden claim that the size of his paycheck was created by any one person. Rand’s insight that infrastructure is a force multiplier is correct, but she was hardly the first person to think of it, although she might have been the first person to make the non-sequitur leap that this means capitalism good altruism bad. If you were digging a large hole by hand, and I gave you a shovel, you would become more productive because you could move dirt more quickly with the shovel than without it. However, you still had to put in work to move that dirt, so we both contributed to completing the job, which should be finished by throwing your copy of Atlas Shrugged into that hole and covering it back up. The upshot of these two paragraphs from John Galt’s raving is that, if I sit on my ass in the shade drinking lemonade while you dig that hole, then I dug the hole and you should thank me for the hard, hard work of sitting on my ass.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and also on the shoulders of dwarves. When I flip on a light switch, the light bulbs in that room would not turn on if there were nobody working at power plants. That should not be a surprise. The conveniences we tend to take for granted would vanish without people doing the work to keep things running behind the scenes. Rand’s mistake is thinking that the mega-capitalist keeps everything running behind the scenes. SpaceX would not exist if it could not draw on the innovations made by NASA, so Elon Musk is as indebted to the federal government as our rail-worker is to Hank Rearden, if not more so. Don’t you think Rand would object to that statement, truth be damned? If she were still alive, and she wanted to confront me in person, would her route to my house take her across the Interstate Highway System, which was sponsored by the federal government?

A gift from Hank Rearden? Notwithstanding that dubbing force multiplication a “gift” is uncharacteristically pro-altruistic coming from Aunty Ayn, this ignores the fact that Hank Rearden’s steel company (more like steal company) cannot function without the machines, scientists, and pushable levers that Rand thinks increase the wages of rank-and-file workers. Hank Rearden should thank them for his paycheck, not the other way around. Also note that, by equating the size of the laborer’s paycheck with how many tons of rails he makes each day, Rand implicitly claims that doing more work gets you paid more. I think we all know that, in real life, the correlation between how much work you do and how much you get paid is negative. Corporations tend to suffer from a condition, which might be called staff infection, wherein blue-suited meeting-attenders are remunerated an order of magnitude more than the blue-collared work-doers who, you know, actually do work.

How can Rand think that holding stock in a company implies that you had a share (pun intended) in all the work done by employees of that company? She even wrote, “the industrialist who built it”, as though Hank Rearden personally laid down every inch of track his company owns, possibly because she read a phrase like, “President Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System”, and took it a teensy-weensy bit too literally. Yet even that pales in comparison to

lauding, “the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new”, who must be sweating blood from the back-breaking work of throwing a fraction of their spare cash at a high-risk investment while the rest goes into Treasury bonds. I suppose Rand’s reconciliation would be that, in her fayntasy world, there exists a one-to-one correspondence between Ubermenschen and tycoons. Please cross-reference a list of Nobel Prize winners with a list of Fortune 500 CEOs and see for yourself how much they overlap. In fairness, the book’s copyright page does say, “Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously…”. Rand’s most imaginative act when writing Atlas Shrugged was naming the book after how much it weighs.