No, Seriously. Who Is John Galt?

I’ve been won­der­ing late­ly if my per­cep­tion of eco­nom­ic real­i­ties is col­ored by a shift in the make­up of the per­sons run­ning indus­try; whether once upon a time there were indus­tri­al­ists with great vision and now, those being few and far between, I make deci­sions as though there aren’t any.

Recent­ly in Cal­i­for­nia we vot­ed to put a lot of pub­lic mon­ey into a high-speed rail to con­nect San Fran­cis­co with Los Ange­les. I’m all for high-speed rail and I think that pub­lic trans­porta­tion is gen­er­al­ly a good thing, so I vot­ed for it, and so did a bunch of oth­er peo­ple. The propo­si­tion passed. I look for­ward to tak­ing a trip on it when it gets built.

It did get me to think­ing though, about how, giv­en demand for a ser­vice, we turned to gov­ern­ment rather than indus­try. There is no Dag­ny Tag­gart from Atlas Shrugged wait­ing to pro­vide the best damn rail ser­vice any­one has ever seen and make a pile of mon­ey off of it. I don’t know if any busi­ness­es ever con­sid­ered build­ing a high-speed rail line between SF and LA, but I do under­stand that this isn’t the Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry and the land between Saint Fran­cis and the Angels isn’t sell­ing for pen­nies an acre.

I rec­og­nize this as a left-wing brand of think­ing: if some­thing should be done, lets get gov­ern­ment to do it. My right-wing con­science (thanks, Dad) nags at the back of my con­scious­ness won­der­ing if there was­n’t a busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty here and whether some genius indus­tri­al­ist could do the job better.

The thir­ty bil­lion dol­lars this project will cost might well be pro­hib­i­tive. It’s a huge risk for an indi­vid­ual to assume. There are only a hand­ful of indi­vid­u­als that can even bor­row that kind of mon­ey. So would it do any good for us to peti­tion the Coca-Cola cor­po­ra­tion or IBM to build a rail line? Should we trust that the wis­dom of the mar­ket econ­o­my dic­tates that we don’t need a rail link between North­ern and South­ern Cal­i­for­nia? That seems to be a defeatist atti­tude. From a prac­ti­cal stand­point, mak­ing this a pub­lic works project seems like the only way that this kind of progress will ever happen.

If the Cap­tains of Indus­try can­not be count­ed upon to pro­vide ser­vices for which we are will­ing to pay, is that because of a fail­ure of entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it? Dag­ny Tag­gart would have got­ten the job done. Dag­ny Tag­gart would have had no shame in trav­el­ing to Wash­ing­ton by pri­vate jet (or pri­vate rail car, any­how) but of course, she’d have some rea­son oth­er than beg­ging for pub­lic mon­ey to trav­el there. My ques­tion is then: were there ever Dag­ny Tag­garts and Hank Rear­dens walk­ing the Earth, or were they the prod­uct of Ayn Rand’s roman­tic imag­i­na­tion? Did no one like that ever exist in the first place? If they did exist, what hap­pened to them?

Then I saw this: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/5957

Yes, I’ve had my crit­i­cisms of the Seg­way. It’s been over­hyped, with­out a doubt. But I’ve always acknowl­edged that it’s a remark­able inven­tion. It took a lot of a lot of dif­fer­ent kinds of smarts to get that thing built, in pro­duc­tion, and mar­ket­ed. Now Dean Kamen is build­ing pros­thet­ic limbs bet­ter than any that came before, and draw­ing from such a vari­ety of tech­nolo­gies to do it that one can only pause and mar­vel at the scope and impact of such a project. It was hype to say that the Seg­way would change every­thing about how we live, but ful­ly-artic­u­lat­ed force-feed­back pros­thet­ic limbs are a huge step toward address­ing the fun­da­men­tal fragili­ty of human life. I am con­fi­dent that in my life­time, I will see peo­ple who have lost both hands writ­ing with a foun­tain pen and peel­ing bananas. If that does­n’t change the whole game of human exis­tence, I don’t know what would.

So per­haps this roman­tic ide­al real­ly does exist? Sad­ly, it seems that for every Dean Kamen there are a hun­dred Ken­neth Lays, and for every Steve Jobs a thou­sand Robert Nardel­lis. So I don’t have any real answers about the nature of the lead­ers of indus­try in our world. What I do have is a small insight into the dif­fer­ence in per­cep­tion between the right wing and the left that may go direct­ly to the nature of the con­flict of val­ues we seem to have.

When the right wing talks about the wealthy, they’re talk­ing about Dean Kamen, Richard Bran­son, Steve Jobs and okay, even Bill Gates. When the left wing talks about the wealthy, they’re talk­ing about Jef­fery Skilling and Ken­neth Lay… and Paris Hilton. When the left says, “these peo­ple are leech­es off the real work­ers,” the right says, “these are the dri­ving force of progress in our world.”

How do you rec­on­cile this? The real dif­fi­cult truth here is that both are right, but they aren’t talk­ing about the same thing. This is the debate that shapes our econ­o­my and deter­mines our prosperity.