Posted on 01/31/2009 11:38:31 AM PST by Publius
Synopsis
The bar is the most expensive in New York. Located on the 60th floor of a skyscraper, it looks like a cellar, even forcing its patrons to stoop to get across the room. Orren Boyle of Associated Steel, James Taggart, Paul Larkin and Wesley Mouch, now identified as Hank Rearden’s lobbyist in DC, all meet to discuss the order of Rearden Metal from the railroad.
Boyle explains to Jim that the delay in supplying steel to the railroad is due to his inability to obtain iron ore, thanks to played out mines, worn out equipment and general transportation problems. Because of the interdependency of business, he wants others to help shoulder his burdens. “The only justification of private property is public service,” says Boyle. He believes that Rearden Metal is dangerous because of its lightness; the National Council of Metal Industries has created a commission to study it.
Jim states that when the people are agreed on something, how dare anyone dissent from the popular will? (This is to become a recurring theme.)
Boyle says that while monopolies are bad, so is unbridled, destructive competition. He is upset that Rearden can always get the material needed for his mills while others can’t. Rearden’s ability and success are destroying everyone else in the steel business; therefore, there should be a national industrial policy aimed at giving everybody a fair shot at iron ore. He wants Taggart’s help in DC.
But Jim wants something for himself. Is it fair at a time of transportation shortages and railroad bankruptcies that there is duplication of service and unbridled, destructive competition from newcomers in areas where the old established railroads have always held sway? Boyle agrees that his friends at the National Alliance of Railroads might weigh in on this.
Larkin, who apparently has some pull in DC, is uncomfortable about betraying his friend Hank Rearden, but in the face of historical necessity he sees he may have to.
Wesley Mouch says little to nothing the whole time except to agree with what everyone else has said. His disloyalty to his boss is not mentioned.
The deals are sealed.
Boyle says he has visited the San Sebastian mines in the People’s State of Mexico, the last piece of private property left in that benighted country. Taggart asks about the rumors of imminent nationalization and Boyle labels them as malicious slander.
Boyle is upset about the poor rail service to San Sebastian provided by Taggart Transcontinental, especially the fact that there is only one passenger train per day, using ancient coaches hauled by an even more ancient wood-burning steam locomotive. Taggart isn’t aware of this but makes excuses to sound as if he knows what is going on.
There is a flashback explaining the relationship between Dagny and Jim and her friendship with Francisco d’Anconia. Dagny made the railroad run, while Jim worked Washington for favors and influence. Jim had built the line to Francisco’s mines at San Sebastian, but the line had never shown a profit. Jim’s friends had purchased large blocks of stock in Francisco’s enterprise. Their rationale for building the line was to help the people of Mexico, not to mention currying favor with the communist government which they believed was the wave of the future. Profit was secondary.
This mis-allocation of resources is causing the more important Rio Norte Line to crumble, and because Taggart cannot service Ellis Wyatt’s oil fields in Colorado, Wyatt is moving his oil by the competing Phoenix-Durango Railroad.
The San Sebastian Line isn’t producing because the mines aren’t producing, but Francisco had explained that his mines were still in development. Dagny knows that Francisco had become utterly worthless over the past decade, but Jim still believes he can deliver. Dagny had been putting the worst assets of the railroad into service in Mexico because she believed the line was about to be nationalized, and Jim goes ballistic when she mentions this. He orders her to run better service in Mexico, but Dagny says she will have to reduce service on the rest of the network to accomplish it. Jim doesn’t want to make decisions or take responsibility, so Dagny resolves to continue providing service her way.
Leaving her office, Dagny stops at a cigarette stand in Taggart Terminal. The proprietor says that there are only a few brands of cigarettes available because most of the other brands have gone out of business. He notes that the people who rush through the train station seem to be haunted by fear. In his list of things wrong with the world, he ends by saying, “Who is John Galt?” Dagny is upset at hearing the phrase, and both of them dislike what people mean when they say it.
Eddie Willers eats in the company cafeteria with a nameless Rail Worker. He tells the Worker that the Rio Norte Line is the last hope for Taggart Transcontinental. There have been more accidents on the system; diesel locomotives are being lost, and United Locomotive Works is two years behind schedule in delivering new equipment. McNamara of Cleveland will lay the new rail on the Rio Norte Line once Rearden delivers. Eddie also tells the Worker of Dagny’s love for the music of Richard Halley. (The Worker is to play a critical role later, so let’s keep the discussion out of spoiler territory.)
Hank and Dagny’s Enemies
The previous two chapters defined Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, and now we meet the villains, all friends of Jim Taggart and a scurvy lot indeed. Orren Boyle was just a name earlier, but now he has a face and an ideology. We’ve heard that Hank employs a lobbyist in DC and now we meet him, or we would if he had anything worthwhile to say.
Concerning the ever quiet and discreet Wesley Mouch, is his last name pronounced “ouch” prefixed by an “M”, “mouk”, “mooch”, or the French “moosh”?
Railroads and Government Transportation Policy
A Canadian rail magnate once told me, “Railroads are a tool of government transportation policy.” From the earliest days of railroading, government at all levels got involved.
Early in the railroad age, the state of Pennsylvania launched the Main Line of Public Works, a plan to build a railroad that would pierce the Alleghenies and join the two halves of the state. After years of pouring money down a rathole and having little to show for it, the state sold the project to a group of financiers in Philadelphia who created the Pennsylvania Railroad, the “standard railroad of the world”.
States would grant corporate charters to one group of people for building a railroad in order to prevent another group of people favored by competing interests from building a different railroad. Favoritism and influence peddling were part of the game from the very beginning.
Abraham Lincoln, a railroad lawyer by trade, gave away vast tracts of the American West to railroads to raise the capital necessary to build across the continent and link the country together. This was a product of grand vision and even grander influence peddling.
Because railroads are so capital intensive, most rail entrepreneurs were financiers first, people who built their rail lines with equal parts BS and other people’s money. It was a rare man, like the real life Jim Hill and the fictional Nat Taggart, who did it the hard way, raising money outside of Wall Street. Most rail entrepreneurs had some facet of government policy on their side.
It had started almost at the very beginning of the United States.
After the War of 1812, the federal government decided it needed a transportation policy, and it concentrated that policy upon canals and roads, classified under the term “internal improvements”. The burning issue of that era was who was going to pay for them. One side took the position of private financing and the other favored the application of government largesse. The two-party system as we know it today coalesced around this issue.
With the arrival of railroad technology in the years before the War Between the States, government policy shifted again, both at the state and federal level. This was the great era of railroad building in America.
With the invention of the internal combustion engine at the beginning of the 20th Century, transportation policy shifted back to roads. This began the great era of highway building, culminating in Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, the greatest and most successful application of practical socialism in American history.
Today, with the highways saturated with trucks, there are signs that government transportation policy is poised to shift back to railroads again.
While Rand’s image of the lone entrepreneur building a railroad is certainly noble, it is also rare. Government was always a key player.
Hank Rearden, Bill Gates and Industrial Policy
James Madison built a constitutional prison for the federal government. By keeping taxation powers limited, there would not be much money to spend, thus keeping the government out of trouble. One thing the Framers feared was that an entire class of people would come to the seat of government to lobby for their share of federal largesse; the term used at the time was “rent seeking”. But the implementation of government transportation policy started an inexorable process.
During the Seventies, there was serious discussion of government allocation of resources to “sunrise” industries, as opposed to “sunset” industries. Financiers like Felix Rohatyn and industrialists like Max Palevsky pushed this idea within the Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976 touting government resource allocation under the title “industrial policy”.
In the book, it was mentioned that Jim Taggart was picked as railroad president by the board because of his pull in DC, thus making him a professional rent seeker for his company. The meeting in this chapter was aimed at using the federal government as a weapon against Hank Rearden because he was a success. Rearden’s own friend and paid lobbyist were in on it. The weapon itself was industrial policy, designed not to protect the people, but to protect other industrialists.
When the Microsoft antitrust suit was filed by the government, the current wisdom was not that Bill Gates had done anything wrong, but that he had failed to hire the right lobbyists in DC and pay off the right politicians and regulators. Gates’ crime, like Hank Rearden’s, was simply to be successful.
Some Discussion Topics
It must be Mooch like in moocher.
Slang.
–verb (used with object)
1. to borrow (a small item or amount) without intending to return or repay it.
2. to get or take without paying or at another's expense;
sponge: He always mooches cigarettes.
3. to beg.
4. to steal.
–verb (used without object)
5. to skulk or sneak.
6. to loiter or wander about.
–noun
7. Also, moocher. a person who mooches.
Also, mouch.
Totally off topic, I read that Atlas Shrugged was the only great novel that wasn’t made into a movie. As I read it again, I was wondering who could play the characters. John Lithgow was who I pictured as Jim Taggert. Unfortunatly, I could never get past thinking that Paul Newman would have made a great Hank.”
Barf alert:
The movie rights to the book Atlas Shrugged are owned by :
Brad Pitts’ bedmate: Jolie.
Do you think she doesn’t see herself in the role of Dagney?
I play around with people I would like to see in some of the roles, and I could see Daniel Craig as Hank Reardon. I can see Fred Thompson as Midas Mulligan.
I cannot pin myself down on the character of John Galt, tho.
Help from anyone?
In most of the early years in America and in the years of our Agrigarian society, supper was the evening meal, and dinner was the mid-day meal.
Lots of farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota still use those terms. We grew up with that.
“Ayn Rand, for all her faults, hated communism and hated Marxism”
And because of her life experience, and obvious trauma from that - I can forgive her the faults.
For me, her faults do not detract from her brilliantly keen eye to the liberal/socialist message, and it’s futility.
I wasn’t the poster that posted about the video. I only referenced another post.
Ping to Chapter 3.
I would cast Rutger Hauer as Ragnar Danneskjold.
I just finished reading the book tonight. (I see I’m not the only one.) :-) That was a very long read, and my eyes are strained, but I wanted to get through it.
Interesting how all the characters we’re fighting today are in the book. I have a few disagreements with what Rand tries to assert in the book, but I’ll save it for upcoming chapter threads. I don’t want to give anything in the story away.
Thought you might be interested.
(I don’t know if you’re on Publius’ Freeper Book Club ping list for Atlas Shrugged or not.)
I just looked it up, and it doesn’t appear that Jolie has the rights to the film, but she is “set” to star in it as Dagny.
I picture Hollywood twisting the story by focusing on certain parts, while the message of free enterprise is lost. Jolie is reportedly a fan, but, judging from the fact that she and her boyfriend were Obama supporters, I’m guessing she isn’t a fan of the free enterprise message. It’s the other messages she probably liked. Someone wrote on the IMDb page that the film will probably be “a tool for the looters”: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/
I’d prefer the Heroes be played by actors who are at least somewhat conservative. I hope Brad Pitt doesn’t end up in the movie. I didn’t picture actors when I was reading the book, but if I’d have to choose... how about... Gary Sinise as Hank Rearden. (He’s not quite what I pictured, but he’s the right age, and I like seeing him in any movie.) Dagny and the others would have to be played by thirty-somethings, I guess. How about Rick Schroder as Eddie or one of the others later in the story.
Ick. Jolie as Dagny. If anyone says Brad Pitt for John Galt, I will reach through the screen and slap them...
Jeri Ryan as Dagny (the one who played 7 of 9 on Star Trek: Voyager).
TIA
I re-read your post and realized that this statement is even more important than the one I cited earlier. So let's some fun by exploring this statement.
Why do liberals want to start at the top and avoid the necessary steps of working one's way up the ladder? Get to the bottom of that one, and you've hit the Unified Field Theory.
I’ll try:
The liberal bosses derive their self esteem from what others think of them, not from what they actually produce with their hands, talents or minds.
One can fail on the way up. Being in charge is insurance against failure because there are always others that can easily be blamed and let go. The person at the bottom is usually dealing with a concrete chore, while the person on top gets to deal in generalities and order others to solve the problem. The top position is seen as indispensable while there are always workers to perform the necessary functions.
Of course, failing is a vital component of the learning process. Never being in a position to fail is never being in a position to learn. So, liberals who demand to start at the top will fail over and over, blame everyone and everything else and never, ever change.
Liberals feel good when they can see themselves “feeling the pain” of the “working class”. They are good at feeling. Working........not so much.
They have all the answers and so have no need to prove themselves to anyone. Being in charge is proof positive of their superiority and also gives them the pleasure of telling others how to do what they cannot. Whenever liberals start an enterprise, almost always with OPM, there are a lot of meetings and they give the workers the impression that they, the workers, are running things. The meetings always end with assignments for the workers while the liberal bosses go back to the office for more bull sessions or meet with clients to pull as much of a bait and switch as they can.
It isn’t the work itself or the end product or even the profit that matters to the liberal. It is being seen as a benefactor and as someone who can command the labor of others.
Wanting to start at the top is a sign of entitlement. What belief is the key to a sense of entitlement? Why do liberals ignore the basic steps to success and want it all now?
I'm glad Jolie is out of the picture because, just as I'm sure we all guessed, here's Hollywood's and Jolie's take on Atlas Shrugged: It's all about "sex and gender".
You can read what Jolie says about Rand and Atlas Shrugged by clicking here and scrolling to the last part of the article. Gag!
But, I'm sure those other actresses named would miss the whole point about free markets, too. How about Angie Harmon as Dagny. She's the right age, and she's a Republican. She's the actress on Law & Order.
"Life's lottery."
I also hope that they release the movies in three parts, with the three books in Atlas. Even that might be cutting it thin.
Blanchett was in Lord of the Rings. She played the elf queen, Galadriel. I don’t know what her politics are. Wikipedia says she’s Australian and she works for an environmentalist organization.
Kathy Bates as Hank’s mom - yes, I can picture it!
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