Posted on 05/09/2009 7:41:37 AM PDT by Publius
Synopsis
Eddie Willers sits down with the Anonymous Rail Worker in the Taggart corporate cafeteria and updates him.
The Anonymous Rail Worker says he’ll be gone for a month; he has taken a month off every summer for the past twelve years.
Hank Rearden walks from his mill down a dark road to Philadelphia where his new apartment is located. He is intercepted by a man of proud bearing who asks to speak with him. He is not there to rob Hank but to give him money that was taken from him by force – and it’s a bar of gold! If robbery is done in open daylight, then restitution must be done at night. The money has been held in trust for Hank for years, and the man took an oath to wait. But after seeing what had been done to Hank, he felt he needed to violate that oath and approach him now. It’s Ragnar Danneskjøld!
He tells Hank one can be a looter or a victim, but he chooses neither. He is merely complying with the system the looters have established. He’s a pirate working for the day when Hank can make a profit from Rearden Metal. Hank doesn’t see that day ever coming; he sees Ragnar as a criminal and prefers that Ragnar had chosen to disappear like the Colorado industrialists and Ken Danagger. Ragnar smiles, lighting up the night, and tells Hank he has a special mission of his own: to destroy Robin Hood. Robin stole from the rich to give to the poor; Ragnar is stealing from the thieving poor and giving back to the productive rich. Robin Hood is the symbol of need, not achievement. Ragnar is the cop who retrieves stolen property and returns it to its rightful owner; he deals in gold, deposited in a gold standard bank, held in the names of victims like Hank. Ragnar’s goal is to return the last twelve years of income taxes to Hank; he has sources in high places and knows just how much the government has taken. The gold is deposited in the Mulligan Bank, which is not in Chicago; Ragnar thinks that Hank will soon know its true location. The gold is intended to start the rebuilding of the world out of the ruins after the final collapse.
Ragnar confirms that the story about the destruction of Orren Boyle’s steel mill in Maine is true. No looter will be permitted to make Rearden Metal – ever.
Hank decides not to take the gold and threatens to call the police if Ragnar ever appears again. Hank says he will live by his own standards, but he is interrupted by the arrival of the police who are making sure Hank is safe; Ragnar backs into the woods. The police say they are looking for a man who is driving a beat up old car with a million dollar engine; Hank says he hasn’t seen him. The cop spots Ragnar, and Hank passes him off as his bodyguard; the police leave. Ragnar smiles, says he hopes to meet Hank again soon, and vanishes. Hank picks up the gold bar and walks on.
Kip Chalmers, a government bureaucrat running for the California legislature, sits with his campaign manager, mistress and a British novelist in a private car attached to the Comet as it goes through Colorado. Chalmers is unhappy with the condition of the track and decides it’s time to campaign for the nationalization of the railroads. He is due in San Francisco the next day for a rally, and his train is now six hours late. Everything comes to a screeching halt as a split rail causes a derailment; the engine is flat on its side. Chalmers approaches hysteria as he encounters a train crew that is doing its job but not fast enough to get him to San Francisco on time.
At the Winston station, the station superintendent, who had been a drifter only a few days before, gets word of the problem and passes the buck to the night supervisor at Silver Springs, who passes the buck to his boss. Division manager Dave Mitchum is the brother-in-law of Claude Slagenhop and owes his job to a bit of blackmail between Jim Taggart and Wesley Mouch involving Mouch’s sister. Clifton Locey had moved Mitchum into his present position at Silver Springs when the former division head quit over the issue of Chick Morrison’s train getting the reserve locomotive. Mitchum is an old railroad hand who blames a conspiracy of the Big Boys for his many career failures, and once again he is at a loss as to what actions to take in this emergency.
Bill Brent, the chief dispatcher, says they aren’t going to send a coal burning steam locomotive into a tunnel built for diesels. They don’t dare delay the Army munitions train to use its diesel to haul the Comet. Nobody wants to take responsibility and make a decision with Locey and the Unification Board watching. Brent says they need to take the diesel from an eastbound freight, which is on its way, after it exits the tunnel, and use that diesel to move the Comet through the tunnel. Then they can use a coal burner to get the Comet to the West Coast; it will be eighteen hours late. Everyone knows that blame is going to be delegated from New York; Brent asks rhetorically, “Who is John Galt?”
When the Comet reaches Winston, hauled by a switching engine, and Chalmers gets the bad news, he goes ballistic. The conductor takes Chalmers to the station, where the bureaucrat orders the station supervisor and call boy to get his train through the tunnel – or else. They explain that Mitchum has told them to hold the train until morning, and Chalmers orders them to send a telegram to Jim Taggart himself. In New York, Jim passes the buck to Clifton Locey, who orders Mitchum to send the Comet through the tunnel “safely” with whatever motive power is available. Mitchum knows he is being framed for the Unification Board. He contacts Omaha to find that the regional boss has disappeared. The Iowa-Minnesota regional boss doesn’t want to hear about it, lest he become involved in the rapidly expanding debacle, and the chief engineer of the Central Region tells him to follow orders. Mitchum types up the train orders, and every employee down the line who executes them knows that the orders are wrong, but if the Unification Board rules against them, they and their families will starve to death.
Mitchum tells Brent he is taking a track motor up the line to Fairmount, where he thinks there may be a diesel engine available. It is clear to Brent that Mitchum is trying to make himself scarce. Mitchum tells Brent to wait thirty minutes and then send the Comet through the tunnel with a coal burning steam locomotive. Brent refuses, demanding a written order, which Mitchum won’t provide. Brent realizes Mitchum is framing him for the Unification Board, so he quits. Mitchum screams that he will bring the law down on him. Brent demands that Mitchum repeat his train order in front of witnesses, and Mitchum assaults him. Brent leaves, and Mitchum gives his orders to the call boy, who executes them after major misgivings.
At Winston, the engineer of the coal burner refuses to drive the train and vanishes into the night. The station agent hands the job to a drunk employee who is a friend of Fred Kinnan and who has already survived a bout with the Unification Board. As the train departs with Chalmers’ car in the consist, the conductor slips off the train and disappears. By amazing coincidence, the passengers in the first class section of the Comet include a professor of sociology who teaches collectivism, a journalist supporting the use of compulsion because his feelings dictate, a schoolteacher who has corrupted the minds of innocents, a newspaper publisher who believes in fascism, and a businessman who received his big break from the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. This is just a short sample of the long list of miscreants Rand lists as passengers on this Train of Fools. As the train enters the tunnel, the last living vision of its passengers is of Wyatt’s Torch.
Railroad Technology
Taggart Transcontinental’s tunnel is based on the real life Moffat Tunnel, opened in 1926, and built by the Denver and Rio Grande. Thanks to multiple mergers, it is owned today by the Union Pacific.
A track motor is a powered handcar, now replaced by the ubiquitous high railer, which is a truck or SUV fitted with railroad wheels. Today, even large trucks, such as vacuum trucks that clean rights-of-way and culverts, carry high railer technology, and railroads designate them as trains on their dispatching systems.
Telegraphers, local dispatchers and call boys disappeared with the addition of radio to the railroads’ arsenal in the Fifties. Today, data telemetry and the Internet permit railroads to have up-to-the-minute information, which is why railroads utilize single location dispatching.
Discussion Topics
Not that I am one.
So let me see if I understand. The only objective truths are ones recognized by DManA?
ML/NJ
Hard money or fiat money is not a sufficient, or IMO, even a necessary, condition to restart an economy. Emphasis on "RESTART".
Something must come before "money". Wealth. As my old econ prof would say, there are only three ways to create wealth; Agriculture, Mining and Manufacturing. So if that is true, and I think it is, then production has to start up first by the people themselves. Which gets me to what I have always found troubling in AR solution to world wide collectivism. Going Galt by destroying the productive capacity is like killing the host to rid it of the parasite. In fact, Ragnar, in shelling the plant, is the perfect metaphor for what I mean. That act, and others like them, is a respite to return society to the dark ages.
So what is my point? Something else is going on in Rand's soul. Some deep hatred for the society she came out of maybe. She herself seems to be the paramount destroyer. I haven't thought this through completely but this Book Club has got me thinking about this in a way I didn't when I first read it. And our contemporary problems also have focused my mind on practical solutions that will not in the end destroy us as a civilization.
You guys are making me think. A hard task indeed!
correction...”recipe” to return society to the dark ages. not respite
On our timeline, our productive capacity has been shipped wholesale to the Third World, and China in particular. We have replaced agriculture, mining and manufacturing with a financial industry that "makes" money by moving pieces of paper from one pile to another, assigning value in fiat currency -- not even paper currency, but electronic bits and bytss -- to those pieces of paper. Our "wealth" is illusory.
The financial industry is in fact the parasite, and it is now most of our economy. And it is killing the host.
When this house of cards collapses, how does one then restart an economy? (This is where I'm trying to get FReepers to think beyond their 401k's.)
But I don't think our "Wealth" is illusory given our description of "True Wealth". Because if wealth is farm land, timber land, and resources in the ground, and machine tools and computers and factories, it may be diminished but it isn't gone.
So if we think it through to the day after the collapse, we might be able to restart everything with people going back to the farms and mines and factories. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems the whole structure of financial wealth ie:401k's,etc. is what is being wiped out because it is based on debt as money.For example, even if GM goes bankrupt the Machine Tools and Dies and Blue Prints remain.
Wouldn't the real wealth remain to be put back to work creating new wealth for our people in what you call "restarting the economy"?
I have always found troubling in AR solution to world wide collectivism. Going Galt by destroying the productive capacity is like killing the host to rid it of the parasite.
As Rand says, "you need to check your premises". In one of my posts above I mentioned that in order for the looters to loot, the pie must exist and it must be accessible. Take away either or both of these conditions and the looters will cease to exist.
Is wealth only able to exist in a halflife? Why are you assuming that the destruction of the factory means that wealth cannot be created? The factory does not by itself produce wealth, the minds of men who design , build and operate the factory do.
Growing up I remember hearing people say that everyone can't be rich, that simply isn't the way that the world works. If I ask them now if they would have thought that everyone would have a color tv in their house and a car (or several) in the driveway, they appear stunned realizing that according to their previous assumptions, today everyone is rich. I mention this because it is our perception which can change with time and circumstances and can alter how we view wealth.
Quite true, thunkit. But keeping with our definition of wealth, which I assume you agree with, I must disagree with you as a practical matter. Wealth in an advanced industrial society depends on past creations of wealth. The car depends on the machine tools. The machine tools depend on the dies and fixtures. The dies and fixtures depend on the blue prints.
One of my first lessons as a machinist apprentice was to learn that the LATHE is the only machine tool that can replace itself. And this machine we call a Lathe was invented first before evrything else. In one degree or another every machine tool is based on a lathe. This is not theoretical. It is a concrete reality. You start burning down factories, breaking up tools and shelling steel plants into oblivion and you may reach a tipping point that will make creation of a Motor Car, for example, almost impossible. At least in a time frame that matters to people. The physical destruction of wealth at some point will return our civilization to a pre-industrial status.
Sure, everything ultimately depends on the Mind of Man. But is was a long slow slog up from the mud flats and wooden hammers.
Ragnar shelled the plant with the conviction that its operation was destined to delay the fall of the looters. This is not a strategy that I would advocate as a solution to our current problems. The nations wealth had been steadily declining through consumption and looting.
Ideally, wealth should expand through capital investment but at this point in AS, wealth is disappearing without any indication of being able to be replenished.
The physical destruction of wealth at some point will return our civilization to a pre-industrial status.
Perhaps with your sentence altered in this way, it may tie together both AS and our current problems.
One of my first lessons as a machinist apprentice was to learn that the LATHE is the only machine tool that can replace itself.
I want to point out that it is not the lathe, but the man operating it that produces wealth.
I think I understand the point you are making in that example but to continue creating wealth knowing it is going to be taken without your permission is an act of self destruction.
....was a long slow slog up from the mud flats and wooden hammers.
Agreed, and I know that as thinking individuals, we can circumvent the hellish world of AS. It will take action on our part and, in my humble opinion, it need not be destructive but well crafted to our advantage.
What an excellent point! I hadn't thought in those terms before. Well, maybe the wealth creation vs. currency thing, but not means of production vs. Rand's method of curing the disease.
OTOH, I guess I can envision an AS world where the looters are in such firm control politically that society will stagnate and probably die anyway, there's nothing to lose by extreme measures to kill the parasites even if it puts the host at risk in the process; the parasites were going to kill it anyway. Like chemo for example. Most of it is incredibly toxic to people, but the idea is that hopefully it's fractionally more toxic to the tumor.
I think the US still has the world's best industrial plant, just by a much smaller margin than previously. So you're exactly right, lop the looters off the top, reining in unreasonable and unreasoning levels of environmental and employment regulation, tort exposure, and meddling from the doofus class in general, and the US could become vastly more competitive overnight.
Two caveats however. People have to be inspired, to really believe it will work, otherwise just telling them to go back to their old jobs is like implementing directive 10-289 -- decreeing by fiat that production will resume some historical level. The other issue I see is the erosion of skilled labor. The wealth may still exist, but if all the tool and die makers "die" off (or whatever flavor of people who know how to do stuff) there's going to be a heck of a learning curve akin to chimps finding a laptop.
They taught me that too, but I never really understood it. Most pieces that make up a lathe don't look like lathe parts to me, or even lathe-able parts. But I could see making a mill on a mill. Do you have a more in depth explanation that would help me understand their viewpoint?
I don't want to belabor the point because at some level I know what you mean and certainly agree with you. But the point I was trying to make ( inarticulately I'm afraid ) was that real wealth in the real world is concrete. It sustains life. Food, clothes, cars, computers.
Men long ago using their minds invented the lathe. And today a man AND a Lathe produces new wealth. So you can't say it is only the man, and not the lathe with the man, that creates the wealth. Yes, all of the tools of our modern world were created by men. And men can do it again. But if we destroy them physically we will have to return to the task of reinventing everything. What can a farmer do without a tractor?
Which is why I have to reject destroying physical wealth to keep it out of the looters hands.
In the news today we have a real life example of looters taking over wealth. Venezuela. But after the looters get it they run it into the ground and produce less and less products. But to destroy those businesses and engage in a literal scorched earth policy like Ragnar worldwide would set mankind back too far.
Maybe Galt and his men in the Gulch should invent a Neutron Bomb to kill all the looters and leave the physical wealth intact. It is after all the inheritance of mankind is it not?
The key part of a lathe is the spindle which spins at a fast RPM to allow machining and inside the spindle at the front end is the collet which opens and closes and grips the work. The spindle has a whole thru it to receive either bar stock or rods. All of this is held inside a casing. The spindle,casing and the collet can be made on a lathe.
In the front of the turning spindle and collet holding the work is the tool holders and tooling which ride back and forth on a machined track. There is also a shaft that controls the two & fro of the tooling holders (In and Out) to machine the work held by the collet. All of these items can be made directly on a lathe. And the tools like a drill and a tap ( for making inside threads ) can be made on a lathe. And a handle is attached to the turret which rides on the saft and track to go back and forth to do the work. All of these can be made on a lathe.
Of course, the sheet metal and motor can't. But hey, I wasn't about to question my foreman!
I'm a little rusty but I think I got the essentials. But if I'm wrong I know the Freeper technical police will set me straight.
Well, all the round parts, sure. Those are what I’d call “lathe parts”. But what about the ways? And I’m not talking about the base casting but about the machining of the ways into the base casting. It seems to me you can make round stuff on a mill a lot easier than you can make long straight stuff like the finish cuts on the ways, on a lathe.
Yeah, a lathe that primitive would still be incomplete just because you couldn’t make a leather belt on the lathe to connect the new lathe to the lineshaft! ;-)
But a lathe still isn’t a lathe without the ways.
At the risk of being labeled the technical police ; ) the usual method of machining a flat surface with a lathe is to insert a shell cutter in the spindle and mount the workpiece in the tool holder, opposite of what is normal. Moving the cross slide will machine the part.
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