John Galt, Ayn Rand, Morality, Atlas Shrugged, freedom, collectivism,

Attentive readers will recall that I have been having an e-discussion with Frances Coppola about the morality of the Ayn Rand novels and their wider significance today.

The second episode published over at the Commentator in January is here.

The third episode is here. It features the train-crash from Atlas Shrugged and the responsibility if any of the passengers and ‘society’ for that disaster. Part of my argument:

As you rightly say, Rand painstakingly explores how the crash happens not because anyone ‘punishes’ anyone but rather because right from the top to bottom of the command chain people avoid responsibility.

The passage is notorious for the way Rand lists different passengers on the train who hurtle to their doom, and describes their various collectivist, corrupt or ‘progressive’ beliefs.

“The woman in Roomette 6, Car No 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had a ‘right’ to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not”. And the humanitarian who thought that the men of ability should be penalised to support the incompetent: “I do not care whether this is just or not”.

I disagree that Rand is saying that these decadent, smug people on the train (or their accompanying children) ‘deserved’ to die. Giving a view on what they deserve seems to suggest a higher authority pronouncing on who should get what and why – just the opposite of what Rand proposed.

The core issue is that ‘ordinary people’ too have to think, and to have responsibility for the results of their decisions. Sooner or later if we all in our own spheres, high or low, act in a way which actually risks disaster, disaster inexorably is what we must get. It is the sheer relentless ‘objectivism’ of this position that is so powerful and striking.

I’m not sure what you’re saying when you argue that all the people who caused the train crash are acting like John Galt, in their rational self-interest. No-one disputes that the greedy wreckers, moochers and looters of Atlas Shrugged are selfish and self-absorbed.

The point of the book is that their self-interest is built on a perverted instrumentalist idea of human nature that rests ultimately on coercion because it does not rely on free trade between people who respect each other – and respect themselves.

So, yes, I do ‘blame’ everyone who passed the buck and so helped cause the crash directly or indirectly, including the cynical and doomed passengers. They would not take responsibility for their actions. Worse, some of them even sought to deny that actions have consequences.

As Rand herself put it in my favourite quote: “We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality”. What are we to make of the hapless denizens of Detroit, whose lives have been destroyed by decades of corrupt government that they have voted for, or the desperate inhabitants of Benefit Street here in the UK?

Are they all free of any responsibility for their own fates? Is it wise, kind or just to subsidise idleness or wrongheadedness?

Part four looks at the famous Money Speech:

FC I found it odd that Galt’s Gulch used money at all. They had no need to – after all, it was a small closed community of people who were selected because they trusted and valued each other. I fear Rand confuses money with what it represents.

Rand’s assertion that gold has “objective” value is simply wrong. The value of gold is as subjective as anything else. It tends to be countercyclical – gold increases in value when trust in other financial assets declines, as we saw after the 2008 financial crisis. We could say that people trust gold more when they trust each other less. I’m not sure this is a good thing.

In both the US and the UK, private sector creation of currency was outlawed for good reasons. In the UK, it was because fractional reserve issuance of paper money by banks was inflationary. And in the US, it was for the opposite reason: the cornering of the gold market by vested financial interests seriously restricted money in circulation, making life very hard for farmers and small businesses.

Now the failed arguments of the past are being brought to bear again by those who would “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” in order to satisfy the “idle holders of idle capital”, and those who would remove from government the right to govern.

CC I’ll take your word for the issues around using gold. But gold has one advantage – you can’t (yet) decide to make more of it! Its value is in principle independent of crude manipulation. I wonder if nowadays financial vested interests could rig the gold market for very long.

Paper money by contrast can be trivially manipulated by governments. When that fact is combined with the monopoly the state has on using force to extract money form citizens in the form of taxes, all sorts of bad things can end up happening.

Fanciful? Not at all. Ayn Rand was writing these books against the background of European concentration camps and Soviet gulags, the crazed state imprisoning and killing literally millions of people.

Now, today, as the USA’s public debts spiral into unfathomable trillions because of sustained political irresponsibility, it’s obvious that something has gone badly wrong at the most basic levels of ethics and logic.

This great passage of Atlas Shrugged compels readers to think hard about economic and human values that they normally take for granted. See, for example, this new wonderful piece about what an iPhone would have cost in 1991:

Considering only memory, processing, and broadband communications power, duplicating the iPhone back in 1991 would have (very roughly) cost: $1.44 million + $620,000 + $1.5 million = $3.56 million … This also ignores the crucial fact that no matter how much money one spent, it would have been impossible in 1991 to pack that much technological power into a form factor the size of the iPhone, or even a refrigerator.

When progressives bang on about ‘inequality’ maybe they should think about what really makes us all richer – and be at least a bit grateful for the wealth that inventors and industrialists have created and shared with us mere mortals.

Part five explores the moral logic of the welfare state:

CC One of the huge messages of Atlas Shrugged is that getting-something-for-nothing is a supreme form of personal corruption. We now see people who have slumped into a life on state benefits whining about what they ‘deserve’.

I am working hard to support myself and my family, taking all sorts of risks as a private entrepreneur. The state takes money from me to pay for people who claim that they cannot work or cannot find work. What is the moral basis for that transaction? Why should I not have the right to expect that unemployed people pick up litter or fill in potholes or do some other unpaid public (or indeed private) service in return for getting some of my hard-earned money?

Of course, people feeling oppressed by this situation have the right to leave the country. But are we all reduced to accepting a form of slavery as the price of being citizens? And, of course, those who leave are doing exactly what John Galt did: withdrawing their work and their minds from propping up a stupid immoral system, thereby compelling those who denied logic and morality to face the inevitable consequences of their own actions.

FC You didn’t answer my question about our responsibility towards those who are not able to produce. But our definition of “not able to produce” is what defines the welfare state.

You want to dismantle the welfare state so you can keep what you consider you have earned through your own hard work. But you ignore the considerable role that good fortune plays in your prosperity. Others work just as hard as you, but are less fortunate and therefore less prosperous. The idea that hard work is always rewarded is fiction.

In Ayn Rand’s world there is no such thing as “unable to produce”. The elderly, sick and disabled don’t exist: children either work, or are cared for and educated by a stay-at-home parent who is supported by a producer (and pays her way with sex and housework). You produce, or you die.

This is fiction too. There will always be people who don’t produce and do have to be cared for. The question is how many of those there should be; who “deserves” support and who does not.

We have argued about the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor for hundreds of years. Like you, many people believe that the welfare state is mushrooming because of a “dependency culture” among working-age adults. But there’s little evidence for that. Unemployment is due to lack of jobs, not lack of willingness to work.

The idea that people must be “compelled” to do some kind of public service to “earn” their benefits is seductive. But we have tried this before. After all, workhouses existed to compel people to work. To paraphrase Whittaker Chambers, this attitude to the unemployed amounts to “To a workhouse – go!”

The fact is that the growth of the welfare state has little to do with “dependency culture” among working-age adults. By far the biggest beneficiaries of the welfare state – including healthcare – are the elderly. And the second largest beneficiaries are working families with children. The cost of supporting the elderly is rising because people are living for longer. And the cost of supporting families is rising because wages are inadequate.

I am not blind to the problems caused by an ageing population and inequality. But to me it is the mark of a civilised society that it cares for those who are not able to provide for themselves, and supports those who have fallen on hard times until they are back on their feet again.

There is nothing “moral” about dismantling the welfare state so those lucky enough to have riches can keep their wealth, if that means others face starvation. People – all people – deserve better than that…