The only thing that stands between us and the level of social disintegration presented in Atlas Shrugged is the fact that the statists do not dare as yet to enforce the antitrust laws to the full extent of their power. But the power is there—and you can observe the accelerating process of its widening application year by year.
Now you might think, however, that the “Railroad Unification Plan” and the “Steel Unification Plan,” which I introduced toward the end of Atlas Shrugged, have no counterpart in real life. I thought so, too. I invented them—as a development dictated by the logic of events—to illustrate the last stages of a society’s collapse. These two plans were typical collectivist devices for helping the weakest members of an industry at the expense of the strongest, by means of forcing them to “pool” their resources. I thought these plans were a bit ahead of our time.
I was wrong.
I quote from a news story of March 17, 1964:
The three television networks have been asked by the Federal Government to consider a tentative plan under which each would turn over a share of its programs to existing or new TV stations that might operate from a competitive disadvantage. …
A companion suggestion, also put forth for discussion by the [Federal Communications] Commission,
would compel some stations now affiliated with one network to accept affiliation with an alternative chain.
The proposals, which in effect call upon the “haves” of the television industry to help the “have nots,” drew strenuous objections over the weekend from the Columbia Broadcasting System….
The thinking behind the F.C.C. proposals is to help sustain existing ultra-high frequency stations and encourage the start of additional such outlets by guaranteeing them program resources that would win audiences. Most advertisers normally prefer the more powerful very-high frequency stations….
Under the controversial proposals, the total pool of network programming would be carved up among two V.H.F. stations and one U.H.F. station.
The alleged justification for these proposals is the desire to correct “competitive imbalance.”
Now observe today’s situation in the sphere of labor.
In Atlas Shrugged, I showed that at a time of desperate shortages of transportation, due to shortages of motive power, track, and fuel, the railroads of the country were ordered to run shorter trains at lower speeds. Today, at a time when the railroads are perishing, with most of them on the brink of bankruptcy, the railroad unions are demanding the preservation of “featherbedding” practices (that is, of useless, un-needed jobs) and of antiquated work and payment rules.
The press comments on this issue were mixed. But one editorial deserves a moment’s special attention: it is from the Star Herald of Camden, New Jersey, of August 16, 1963, and it was sent to me by a fan.
The money-makers, the powerful business leaders of America, have failed to realize that prosperity can be inhuman. They have failed to understand that people take precedence over profits….
Ambition and the drive for profit is a good thing. It spurs man to higher achievements. But it must be tempered by concern for society and its members. It must be slowed down in the light of human needs.
These are the thoughts that trouble us when we ponder the railroad stalemate. Crying “featherbed!” like a war whoop, the managers of the railroads have insisted on eliminating tens of thousands of jobs . . . jobs that are the mainstays of homes . . . jobs that mean the difference between a man’s feeling dignified or futile. . . . Before you vote yes for such painful progress, imagine your husband or brother or father as one of those destined to be sacrificed on the altar of progress. Far better, in our view, to have the government nationalize the railroads and prevent another human disaster on their one-way track of making profit at human expense.
This editorial had no byline, but my anonymous admirer had written on it in penciled block letters: “By Eugene Lawson???”
That kind of “humanitarian” attitude is not directed against profits, but against achievement; it is not directed against the rich, but against the competent. Do you think that the only victims of the mystic-altruist-collectivist axis are a few exceptional men on the top of the social pyramid, a few men of financial and intellectual genius?
Here is an old clipping from my “Horror File,” a news story dating years back:
Britain is currently stirred by the story of a young coal miner who has quit his job to prevent 2,000 miners from striking at Doncaster.
Alan Bulmer, 31, got in trouble with his fellow workers when he finished a week’s assignment three hours ahead of time. Instead of sitting down for three hours, he started on a new stint of work.
More than 2,000 miners held a meeting last Sunday to object to his working too hard. They demanded that he be demoted for three months and his pay cut from $36 a week to $25.
Buhner quit his job to end the crisis, with the statement that it always has been his belief that “a man should do a full day’s work for a full day’s pay.”
Officials of the government-operated mines say the affair is up to the unions.
Ask yourself, what will become of that young man in the future? How long will he preserve his integrity and his ambition if he knows that they will bring him punishments, not rewards? Will he continue to exercise his ability if he is to be demoted for it? This is how a nation loses the best of its men.
Do you remember the scene in Atlas Shrugged when Hank Rearden finally decided to go on strike? The last straw, which made the situation clear to him, was James Taggart’s statement that he, Rearden, would always find a way to “do something”—even in the face of the most irrational and impossible demands. Compare that with the following quotation in a news story of December 28, 1959—which is a statement by Michael J. Quill, head of the Transport Workers’ Union, commenting on a threatened city transit strike: “A lot of people are thinking we are taking this to the brink. But it so happens that every time we went to the well before, there was something there.”
In the closing chapters of Atlas Shrugged, I described the labor situation of the country as follows:
“Give us men!” The plea began to hammer progressively louder upon the desk of the Unification Board, from all parts of a country ravaged by unemployment, and neither the pleaders nor the Board dared to add the dangerous words which the cry was implying: “Give us men of ability!” There were waiting lines years’ long for the jobs of janitors, greasers, porters, and bus boys; there was no one to apply for the jobs of executives, managers, superintendents, engineers.
An editorial in the July 29, 1963, issue of Barron’s mentions:
the mounting scarcity of skilled labor including, as Dr. Arthur F. Burns noted in a recent critique of official unemployment statistics, “extensive shortages of scientists, teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses, typists, stenographers, automobile and TV mechanics, tailors and domestic servants.”
Do you remember the story of the Minnesota harvest disaster in Atlas Shrugged? A bumper crop of wheat perished along the roadsides—around the overfilled silos and grain elevators—for lack of railroad freight cars which, by government order, had been sent to carry a harvest of soybeans.
The following news story is from the Chicago Sun Times of November 2, 1962:
Illinois farm officials and grain dealers met Thursday in an effort to relieve an acute freight car shortage which is threatening Midwest’s bumper grain harvest….
Farmers and grain dealers agreed that the shortage of railroad boxcars has become “critical,” and saw little hope of relief for at least two weeks.
Some grain elevator operators showed the group photographs of corn piled on the ground near elevators plugged up with corn which can’t be shipped….
The boxcar shortage was blamed on the harvesting of three major crops—corn, soybeans and milo—at the same time this year. In addition, there have been heavy movements of government-owned grain.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar Danneskjold denounced Robin Hood as the particular image of evil that he wanted to destroy in men’s minds. “He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does.”
I shall never know whether Ragnar was or was not the inspiration of an article denouncing Robin Hood, which appeared last year in a British journal called Justice of the Peace and Local Government Review, a magazine of law and police affairs. The occasion for the article was the revival of the Robin Hood festival.
Having regard to the fact [said the article] that the exploits of this legendary hero were chiefly concerned with robbing the rich under the specious motive of giving to the poor, a function which, in modern times, has been taken over by the welfare state, it is a question of some doubt whether a Robin Hood festival is not contrary to public policy.