Atlas was Smug

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is practically the bible of American libertarians.  Due to its cult popularity, I decided to write my own brief analysis of it.  It has the philosophical depth and evenhandedness of Mary Sues locking horns with cartoon villains, while the obvious self-insert protagonist (Dagny Taggart) has sex with all the male heroes.  In short, it's like Twilight for sociopaths.  And that isn't even the worst aspect of it…

For starters: a brief summary.  Hank Rearden is a self-made promethean innovator who invented a superior steel alloy.  His incompetent and unscrupulous rival, Orren Boyle, sells an inferior brand of steel.  With the help of the malevolent government, Boyle spreads propaganda that defames Rearden Steel to gain a competitive edge.  (Never mind that a crucial function of government is to prevent false advertising, slander, libel, and other deceptive practices.)  Increasing government control and wage regulations continue to impede businesses further, and in a move that's completely plausible and 100% realistic, the business leaders go on strike and leave their respective companies to fail rather than continue to profit from them.

I'm sure you already see the problem.  In order for an allegory to be effective, the characters' actions have to map to human nature in a way that makes sense.  Even allegories as unrealistic as Aesop's The Lion and the Mouse obey this.  However, the people, organizations, and society in Atlas Shrugged don't act anything like their real world counterparts, which nullifies the story's "lessons."  I could pick apart this story all day, but I'd like to focus on one of the less obvious oversights.

The central theme of Atlas Shrugged is that an unregulated market is best at encouraging and rewarding innovation.  However, what if one of the workers in Hank Rearden's steel factory is a natural genius, but the free market allows Rearden to pay him sweatshop wages (which can be as low as 30 cents per hour in unregulated countries, or a couple dollars if you're lucky) that keep education out of reach?  He'd be far less likely to be able to use his gift to innovate society because of the free market.  Even if he somehow overcomes this obstacle, it isn't exactly cheap to test prototypes and hire patent lawyers.

To give you an idea of how severe this oversight is, imagine slightly different circumstances, in which Hank Rearden grew up in a poor family and had to work in Orren Boyle's steel factory to make ends meet.  We might have never had Rearden steel, and we'd be unwittingly stuck with the inferior Boyle metal.  How many Rearden metals have we missed out on by giving all the power to the rich and marginalizing the poor?

To figure out why Ayn Rand didn't worry about this, let's look at the artfully subtle monikers she assigned to the working class and the officials who help them get paid living wages: "moochers" and "looters," respectively.  Nobody has announced their dehumanization of an entire demographic of people this clearly since the 1930's in a certain European nation that shall not be named.  Of course employees don't have inventive capabilities or thoughts of their own; they're just faceless uniforms that exist to make somebody else's dream come true.  Why should the biological components of the machinery get a slice of what they helped create?  They're not people, silly!

You probably think nobody could be so detached and clueless – but wait.  Listen to the immediate roar of applause after Mitt Romney said he wants everybody to be rich.  The people clapping didn't bother to take a moment to reflect on the logistical absurdity of everybody being rich.  They don't understand that if they want to go out to eat, somebody has to work at a restaurant.  If they want to put out their garbage at night and have it be gone in the morning, somebody has to work in sanitation.  Until somebody invents Jetsons robots to do all the undesirable jobs, this is reality.  Hopefully that would-be inventor doesn't grow up under anarcho-capitalism, toiling away in Orren Boyle's sweatshop.