Rand, Ayn – Capitalism

From The New York Times of February 12:

The furor over Britain’s loss of scientific talent was intensified today when a foremost theoretical physicist said he was leaving for the United States.

Dr. John Anthony Pople, superintendent of the Basic Physics Division at the National Physical Laboratory, said he was going to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in about a month.

Afternoon newspapers used large headlines to report the move, the 13th since the weekend. One paper’s front-page headline read: “Another One Down the Brain Drain.”

From The New York Times of February 13:

With the announcement today of the impending departure of at least five more scientists from Britain, the nation began searching with new anxiety for root causes of the exodus.

The story names two of the departing scientists: Dr. Ray Guillery, 34-year-old associate professor of anatomy at University College, London, and also from University College,

Dr. Eric Shooter, 39, an assistant professor of biochemistry.

From The New York Times of February 16:

With Britain in a furor over the steady departure of her scientists, the nation is again searching for the causes of the exodus and demanding remedies….

The “brain drain,” as the departure of scientists is called here, is not new to Britain. For decades, foreign universities and other institutions of learning and research, especially in the United States, have been drawing scientific talent from Britain.

In the last academic year Britain lost 160 senior university teachers, about 60 of them to the United States, according to a survey published by the Association of University Teachers….

British scientists with newly acquired Ph.D.’s have been leaving the country permanently at a rate of at least 140 a year, according to a report last year by the Royal Society. This would be about 12 per cent of the nation’s output . . .

Most commonly, the scientists who depart permanently explain that funds available for research equipment and staff in the United States cannot be matched at home.

Some say frankly that they are attracted by salaries two or three times higher than they get in Britain and also by what they consider a greater general regard in the United States for scientific effort and achievement.

Others complain about the shortage of senior posts in universities, about the administrative jungle through which research grants must pass in Britain and about what they term the mean, controlling hand of the Treasury in all university grants.

What intellectual arguments are being offered to the scientists as an inducement to prevent them from leaving, and what practical remedies are being proposed? Quintin Hogg, Secretary of State for Education and Science, “appealed to the patriotism of scientists to stay at home. ‘It is better to be British than anything else,’ he said.” An earlier story {The New York Times, October 31, 1963) stated that a “report, submitted by a committee headed by Sir Burke Trend, Secretary of the Cabinet, calls for reshaping Britain’s civil science set-up and for giving increased powers to the Minister of Science.” [Italics mine.]

There is, of course, a great deal of implicit and explicit

indignation against American wealth and big business, which the British seem to regard as chiefly to blame for the flight of their scientific talent.

Now I want to call your attention to two significant facts: the age and the professions of the scientists who were mentioned by name in these stories. Most of them are in their thirties; most of them are connected with theoretical medicine.

Socialized medicine is an established institution of Britain’s political system. What future would brilliant young men be able to achieve under socialized medicine? Draw your own conclusions about the causes of the “brain drain”—about the future welfare of those left behind in the welfare state—and about the role of the mind in man’s existence.

The next time you hear or read reports about the success of socialized medicine in Great Britain and in the other welfare states of Europe—the reports brought by the superficial, concrete-bound mentalities who cannot see beyond the range of the moment and who declare that they observe no change in the conscientious efficiency of the family doctors— remember that the source of the family doctors’ efficiency, knowledge, and power lies in the laboratories of theoretical medicine, and that that source is drying up. This is the real price which a country pays for socialized medicine—a price which does not appear on the cost sheets of the state planners, but which will not take long to appear in reality.

At present, we lag behind Great Britain on the road to the collectivist abyss-—but not very far behind. In recent years, our newspapers have been mentioning alarming reports on the state of the enrollment in our medical schools. There was a time when these schools had a much greater number of applicants than could be accepted—and only the ablest students, those with the highest academic grades and records, had a chance to be admitted. Today, the number of applicants is falling—and, according to some reports, will soon be less than the number of openings available in our medical schools.

Consider the growth of socialized medicine throughout the world—consider the Medicare plan in this country—consider the strike of the Canadian doctors in Saskatchewan, and the recent strike of the doctors in Belgium. Consider the fact that in every instance the overwhelming majority of the doctors fought against socialization and that the moral cannibalism of the welfare-statists did not hesitate to force them into slavery at the point of a gun. The picture was particularly eloquent in Belgium, with thousands of doctors fleeing

blindly, escaping from the country—with the allegedly “humanitarian” government resorting to the crude, Nazi-like, militaristic measure of drafting the doctors into the army in order to force them back into practice.

Consider it—and then read the statement of Dr. Hendricks in Atlas Shrugged, the surgeon who went on strike in protest against socialized medicine: “I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?”

That is the question that should be asked of the altruistic slave-drivers of Belgium.

The next time you hear a discussion of Medicare, give some thought to the future—particularly to the future of your children, who will live at a time when the best brains available will no longer choose to go into medicine.

Ragnar Danneskjold, the pirate in Atlas Shrugged, said that he was fighting against “the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices—that the need of some men is the knife of a guillotine hanging over others and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord.” This is the essence of the morality of altruism: the greater a man’s achievement and the greater society’s need of him—the more vicious the treatment he receives and the closer he comes to the status of a sacrificial animal.

Businessmen—who provide us with the means of livelihood, with jobs, with labor-saving devices, with modern comforts, with an ever-rising standard of living—are the men most immediately and urgently needed by society. They have been the first victims, the hated, smeared, denounced, exploited scapegoats of the mystic-altruist-collectivist axis. Doctors come next; it is precisely because their services are so crucially important and so desperately needed that the doctors are now the targets of the altruists’ attack, on a worldwide scale.

As to the present condition of businessmen, let me mention the following. After completing Atlas Shrugged, I submitted it, in galley-proofs, to a railroad expert, for a technical check-up. The first question he asked me, after he had read it, was: “Do you realize that all the laws and directives you invented are on our statute books already?” “Yes,” I answered, “I realize it.”

And that is what I want my readers to realize.

In my novel, I presented these issues in terms of abstractions which expressed the essence of government controls and of statist legislation at any time and in any country. But the principles of every edict and every directive presented in Atlas Shrugged—such as “The Equalization of Opportunity Bill” or “Directive 10-289″—can be found, and in cruder forms, in our antitrust laws.

In that accumulation of non-objective, undefinable, unjudi-cable statutes, you will find every variant of penalizing ability for being ability, of penalizing success for being success, of sacrificing productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity. You will find such rulings as: the forced break-up of large companies or the “divorcement” of companies from their subsidiaries (which is my “Equalization of Opportunity Bill”)—the forcing of established concerns to share with any newcomer the facilities it had taken them years to create— the compulsory licensing or the outright confiscation of patents—and, on top of this last, the order that the victims teach their own competitors how to use these patents.

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