Scholarship Submission: Ayn Rand Institute Atlas Shrugged Essay Competition (Part 2)
However, beyond its stated altruistic, common-interest motive, the rule’s passage is part of a personal deal between Orren Boyle and James Taggart to exert influence in Washington to cripple Rearden Steel in exchange for destroying Taggart Transcontinental’s primary competition in Colorado: Dan Conway’s Phoenix-Durango. When Dagny Taggart confronts Conway about fighting back to keep his railroad, he responds, “… they had the right to do it… I promised to obey the majority. I have to obey… It would be wrong. I’m just selfish. Though he had been wronged by the expropriation of his line, Conway gives his predators sanction for their actions by not fighting the seizure of his property, and even recognizing their right to do it despite his beliefs to the contrary.
Quite differently from Conway, Ellis Wyatt issues an ultimatum to Taggart Transcontinental to serve his needs or be destroyed with him, essentially denying permission to the predators to harm him. This is reflected later on when he disappears, not only removing his productivity from the reach of the looter society, but also setting his oil wells on fire. His burning wells become known as Wyatt’s Torch, a symbol of defiance- a refusal of sanction that burns until the heroes can return to reclaim the world.
The ever-increasing regulations issued by the looter government in the name of “the public good” until and after the passage of Directive 10-289 destroy all remaining incentives for production and soon afterward halt the growth of the economy. Directive 10-289 gives the government a limitless range of “emergency” economic powers, freezes wages, consumption, and innovation. Employment becomes based on need instead of productivity, as determined by the Unification Board, while the new-found power of those residing in government is exploited to grant favors to friends and other preferred classes. Production and commerce come to a halt; quality plummets as the worst companies receive windfall demand for essential commodities; the good of the public becomes the good of the cronies and scavengers as wealth is pried from the corpse of what was once an economic giant. The philosophy of sacrifice results in a reality of destruction.
“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Though Rearden had not yet met John Galt at the time of his trial, he unsurprisingly reiterates a form of Galt’s oath when he rejects the “public good” that aims to shackle him to the needs of society. No matter how altruistically its actors behave, any system which emphasizes the moral righteousness of sacrifice is barbarous as a principle in compromising one individual for the benefit of another. Beyond that, it is corruptible. It serves as a means of exploitation of man’s passionate desire to live: the villains of Atlas Shrugged are numerous and of many philosophical colors, but they all are similar in advocating coercion as a means to their ends. The “public good” is merely one pretext by which they seek to guilt those who produce into volunteering their livelihood away without resistance. Should the productive reject the public and not proffer their labor, the villains then have no value to offer the individual- as one offers a value in exchange for another in mutual trade- but merely a “zero,” the promise that they will not kill, imprison, or otherwise harm the productive if they submit to their demands. When the Atlases of the world- the producers- shrug their burdens and consent to their subjection no longer, the villains will have no control over individuals who understand rationality and production as the only true means of survival. They will no longer possess an avenue to evade reality. They invariably must face that reason is law, that creation is sustenance, that A is A; to do otherwise is to perish.
