“You know damn well what I came here for!” he snapped. “I’ve heard some incredible things about our trains in Mexico.”
“What things?”
“What sort of rolling stock are you using down there?”
“The worst I could find.”
“You admit that?”
“I’ve stated it on paper in the reports I sent you.”
“Is it true that you’re using wood-burning locomotives?”
“Eddie found them for me in somebody’s abandoned roundhouse down in Louisiana. He couldn’t even learn the name of the railroad.”
“And that’s what you’re running as Taggart trains?”
“Yes.”
“What in hell’s the big idea? What’s going on? I want to know what’s going on!”
She spoke evenly, looking straight at him. “If you want to know, I have left nothing but junk on the San Sebastian Line, and as little of that as possible. I have moved everything that could be moved — switch engines, shop tools, even typewriters and mirrors — out of Mexico.”
“Why in blazes?”
“So that the looters won’t have too much to loot when they nationalize the line.”
“If you want to know, I have left nothing but junk on the San Sebastian Line, and as little of that as possible. I have moved everything that could be moved — switch engines, shop tools, even typewriters and mirrors — out of Mexico.”
“Why in blazes?”
“So that the looters won’t have too much to loot when they nationalize the line.”
Exactly the experience my grandfather had. The government slowly put the squeeze on his business in Mexico in the 1920s, demanding more and more, until finally he loaded everything moveable and headed for the border. The rest was seized.
Since then, the family advice has always been, “Never, never, never never, go [invest] south of the border.”
Ayn Rand was SO ahead of her time.
Of course, she’d already seen what socialism did to her country.