Analytical note
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Ayn Rand and her novel advert
2. The plot: briefly
3. Plot and reality
4. The main idea of the novel and true life
5. The charm of the "Atlas..." as a result of dementia and ignorance
6. Public welfare and scientific and methodological support of state and business controlling
Conclusion
1. Ayn Rand and her novel advert
Ayn Rand is the pseudonym of the American writer and social philosopher Alice Zinovievna Rosenbaum (1905 — 1982). She was born in St. Petersburg to a Jewish family of a successful pharmacist. According to her biographers, she was interested in politics from childhood and rejoiced at the overthrow of the monarchy and the victory of the February revolution. Then the Great October socialist revolution deprived the family of ownership of the pharmacy, which was their family business. And judging by her later life, she could not understand the meaning of the Great October. The family of the future Ayn Rand spent the period of the post-revolutionary civil war in the Crimea, where Alice graduated from school in Yevpatoria. Since 1921 she studied at Leningrad University and majored in social pedagogy. Since 1925 she worked as a tour guide in the Peter and Paul fortress before leaving the USSR in 1926. After that, she lived in the United States and waged an ideological struggle against the spread of the ideas of communism and convinced her readers and listeners that the most effective — and therefore the most just — social organization stems from the freedom of private enterprise, freedom of trade and unlimited competition of private entrepreneurs, and all the rest is a kind of slavery based on force coercion and blackmail by force.1
Her works have been translated into Russian and are now available on the Internet, and there is a part of Ayn Rand in the stream of propaganda being poured out on the population, including in Russia. In the fall of 1996 Radio Russia aired a series of programs that read Ayn Rand's book "The concept of selfishness".2 And to this day, many business coaches in Russia recommend the works of Ayn Rand to their students and, in particular, her novel "Atlas shrugged".3 On the Internet, sites dedicated to this novel mostly have boffo reviews about it, although there are also isolated negative opinions about the literary style of the novel, and about the ideas expressed in it, and about Alice Rosenbaum herself. But the brevity of the raptures and censures does not allow us to understand which side is essentially right.
Excerpt from the 2013 text: "a Few years ago, when Andrey Illarionov was still an adviser to Vladimir Putin, he suggested that his boss read Ayn Rand. It is not known whether the President has read the texts, but this is not so important: cohorts of her followers are already setting up Russian life according to the laws of predatory individualism.4 The time has passed for Russian literature with its humanistic pathos, Chekhov's "little men with a hammer" and Dostoevsky's "tears of a child". The time has come for effective managers: their books, their laws, their fuhrers."5
But the question still arises: if certain books have been promoted in Russia's business circles and among its politicians for more than 20 years, then who is "led" to its books? And should we take Ayn Rand's recipes for life improvement into action?
To answer these questions, let's delve into the plot of the novel.
2. The plot: briefly
The novel " Atlas Shrugged " takes place in the fictional world of Ayn Rand.6 However, this is not the real world with its history, in which fictional characters of the novel are introduced, as, for example, in "War and peace" or "The Quiet Don". And this is not a "dystopia", as many literary critics and business coaches characterize this novel; it is a fantasy, i.e. fabrications that are largely incompatible with the objective laws that govern the lives of people and culturally peculiar societies in the objective reality in which we live and of which we are a part.7 And this is a very boring "fantasy", which Ayn Rand wrote for 15 years from 1942 to 1957.
Ignoring the laws of nature, including the laws that govern people's lives, is what distinguishes the genre of "fantasy "from the genre of" science fiction "and the "socio-philosophical" genre.8 Therefore, we will not find fault with the fact that in some places of the plot Alice Rosenbaum shows ignorance of physics and chemistry of our world: in the fictional world there are other physics and chemistry, as well as other objective laws. But in the same way, it does not operate and the objective laws inherent in the life of our real world, including social laws, and it is for this reason that the plot "works out" in the genre of "fantasy" instead of breaking up under the influence of objective laws of our world.
As a result, it is wrong and dangerous to transfer to our world from the fictional Ayn Rand world recipes for solving problems that have proven effective "there" — dangerous both for ourselves and for others, and for posterity.
This fictional world includes the United States and other states that are mentioned stiffly in the text, mostly in connection with certain events of the main storylines localized within the borders of the United States. The time of the novel is the beginning of the 1930s, judging by the technosphere described in it. It generally corresponds exactly to the beginning of the 1930s for the United States: there are cars both passenger and cargo, but there is no industry far and long-distance interregional motor transportations, "door to door", which later killed many railways of the United States because they lost performance in the competition for freight traffic; railways are still the main mode of intercity and interregional transport, their driveways enter the territory of all any large industrial enterprises, but the locomotives have superseded by "diesel electric locomotives" with the most important highways, the speed of trains which reach over 100 km/hour; there are civil aviation and the network of airfields throughout the country; widely spread broadcasting; television has already appeared, TV is there, but it is not common; in the cities there are dry cleaning, cafes and restaurants, theatres, cinemas and concert halls.9 If we assume that in the real history of the United States, the era of mass construction of railways began in the late 1850s, and two of the characters in the novel are great-grandchildren of the founder of one of the largest railway companies (i.e. they are the fourth generation of the family that owns the firm), then the time of events described in the novel also corresponds to the end of the 1920s — the first half of the 1930s.
In all other respects, the world of the characters in the novel has nothing in common with the history of our global civilization, except for the fact that the American continent was once discovered by someone from Europe, and it is inhabited mostly by people from Europe, who replaced the indigenous population and spread European-type civilization to this continent with some modifications.10 In the world invented by Ayn Rand, there is no mention of the American civil war of 1861 — 1865, nor of the first world war of the twentieth century and its consequences, nor of the great October socialist revolution, which changed the face of our world and the further course of the history of real humanity. Neither the Russian Empire nor the USSR are mentioned in the novel at all. Since the novel belongs to the genre of "fantasy", the author had the right to invent the world of the characters of the novel without Russia-the USSR.11 The problems of national and racial relations in the novel are also not affected: there are no negroes, no jews, no "Italian mafia", but only subjects devoid of national identity, which can be guessed that they are white "pseudo-humans" who grew up and live in a European-American culture (if you relate to the reality of our world); there is no freemasonry, without which state and business management at the macro level in the United States is really impossible and therefore does not exist.
The fictional world is going through hard times. In different regions of the world, capitalism based on a liberal market economy is being replaced by "people's republics". They regard private entrepreneurs as exploiters of hired personnel who oppose social progress, and therefore, in order to ensure "public welfare" and "fair distribution of benefits", the state authorities of the "people's republics" take over the economy, implementing the slogan of communism "from each according to his ability — to each according to his need".1213 In particular, the "people's Republic of Mexico" and its state plan are mentioned; France, Norway, great Britain, Portugal, Turkey, China, India, Greece are also "people's republics", and at the end of the novel, Chile and Argentina become "people's republics". However, in practice, in all the "people's republics" after taking the economy under the power of the state, the economic situation has deteriorated to a catastrophic level: they are not able to provide themselves, first of all, with food, not to mention everything else that is objectively necessary for the life and development of society, and they are in dire need of "humanitarian assistance" that the United States still provides them. So, in the "People's Republic of China" "there are not even enough nails to build at least some housing." In the "people's republics" of Europe, the norm is hard labor in concentration camps, a fourteen-hour working day, and scurvy is rampant. The reasons for this state of affairs in the "people's republics" are simple:
• On the one hand, state power has been seized by people who claim to act on behalf of the people, but they belong to the psychological type that in the real world is called "bureaucrats". Bureaucrats in life are moral freaks with no moral principles other than opportunism as a principle.14 Their psychology is only slightly more complex than the "psychology of coelenterates": everything that is within the reach of the bureaucrat's "tentacles" is automatically grabbed and shoved into their "anus", combined with the "mouth", and if something can't be shoved in there, it is destroyed. They are idiots in relation to their positions and responsibilities, and therefore do not know anything, do not know how to do anything, but they issue all sorts of orders that are inadequate to life as such, the implementation of which only aggravates the situation. They do not take responsibility for anything, but demand from all subordinates selfless work for the "public good" and unconditional execution of their "brilliant orders" (this is one of the manifestations of unscrupulousness as a principle). For all that the bureaucrats insist that they are doing the most important thing for society and there is noone to replace them with, and in order that they could work on "public good", all their needs must be satisfied to the maximum and in full; and in terms of "national crisis" (temporary — "tomorrow the economy will improve and everyone will be better off") all others should honestly and obediently fulfill their orders, and obtain livelihood to the extent and in the manner, that will be appointed by these bureaucrats. Those who do not agree with such a policy of "public good" should wait for "better times" in concentration camps (so as not to prevent bureaucrats and "patriots" from overcoming the crisis), if they have not committed more serious real and imaginary crimes, for which the "people's power" punishes with death.
• On the other hand, in a society subject to bureaucrats, people accept the mission of sacrifice and meekly endure all this, insanely believing in a "bright future" and waiting for it to come, or demoralize and go into banditry or degradation. Some die, others join the ranks of bureaucrats as new vacancies open up in the sprawling hierarchy of state power bureaucracy that permeates everywhere, or some bureaucrats lose their positions in the struggle with each other.
But in the USA the processes leading to the fact that they will also become "people's republic" the type already held in such as countries: where scoundrels and idiots seize state power under the cries about the provision of "public welfare" by subjecting the fat cats and entrepreneurs rank smaller public authorities, who are concerned about "the welfare of the people". As they seize the government power, scoundrels and idiots become bureaucrats and begin to interfere in the economy, reaping the fruits of other people's labors. As a result of their policies, at the beginning of the novel, the United States lives in an economic depression that began, provoked by the allegedly incompetent interference of bureaucrats in the business community as a whole and in the work of individual sectors of the economic system, and at the end of the novel, the economic system comes to a complete collapse: trains do not run on the railways, industrial enterprises do not work, food supply is disrupted, everything that can be stolen from industrial and infrastructure facilities is stolen.15 In General, the collapse of the economy is described realistically and knowledgeably based on impressions of the economic devastation in Russia during the civil war and foreign intervention.
However, the collapse of the US economy in the novel was accelerated. One of the characters in the novel is John Galt. He is an outstanding physicist and inventor of an engine that runs on publicly available static electricity of the atmosphere. He did not want the parasites to use the fruits of his work, destroyed the engine and engaged in social activities, but in a specific form. He began to successfully persuade the most effective businessmen and top managers to quit their businesses and "disappear". Without their knowledge and skills, the most successful enterprises in the industry were quickly brought to ruin, because in the fictional Ayn Rand world, these owners and managers did not have a "talent pool", whose representatives could take their place and effectively continue the business, and in the economy — there were not enough effective competing enterprises that could occupy the corresponding niches in the market: this is the idea of the author of "fantasy" for entrepreneurs and applicants for entrepreneurs, because if the introduction of "death squads" that would destroy entrepreneurs who do not want to disappear. The "disappeared" entrepreneurs were transported by John Galt to a valley in the middle of a mountain desert, where they organized the ideal socio-economic system, which we will discuss in section 6. To prevent state bureaucrats from reaching this entrepreneurial paradise with all the might of state intelligence agencies and the armed forces, the place for this paradise, called "Atlantis", was chosen far from populated areas in a deserted area, and John Galt closed it from observation and unauthorized entry by physical fields unknown to the official science of their world. Meanwhile, John Galt continued to work as a track worker on the railroad, the Vice-President of the board of which was the main character of the novel Dagny Taggart.
3. Plot and reality
This is the place in this note where you need to explicitly specify:
The novel "Atlas shrugged" gives the impression that it was written by a persistent street peddler with an education that does not go beyond the elementary school curriculum.16 Ayn Rand’s vision and understanding of economic life, social organization, finance, causal relationships within social processes, biological bases of civilization, the essence and role of management, the nature and role of the state — for some reason corresponds to this level. That is, the novel is a graphomania of a very ignorant individual, who is not able to realize and eliminate his ignorance — incompetence due to dementia.
Ayn Rand, having preserved the worldview of an immature, preoccupied teenage girl who lives on everything ready-made in a well-off family, and constructing a plot that is cute to her mores, completely ignored the historical experience of the real world, which contradicts everything she wrote.
The novel Atlas shrugged was published in 1957. By this time there occurred the following events that Alisa Rosenbaum could not help knowing, and the essence of which she was supposed to understand being a person claiming to be a social philosopher or being a writer, showing the reader the problems of their society and the ways and means of resolving them.
FIRST. In 1929 The United States plunged into the "great depression". Its direct "arsonists "were not really extremely stupid and incompetent Washington bureaucrats who maliciously interfered in the affairs of supposedly always competent private business, but the owners of the Federal reserve system (i.e., private entrepreneurs — "financial geniuses"), to whom the US state bureaucracy transferred full power over the country's finances in 1913, agreeing to the creation of the Federal reserve. As a result, the United States lost financial sovereignty, which the country has not restored to this day. During the "great depression" in the United States, several million people died of starvation and mental collapse, but statistics on the demographic damage suffered are still classified, and this topic is not publicly discussed in the United States, either in the media or in the open scientific official.17 If Ayn Rand was not personally affected by all these social disasters, then she could not have been unaware of them while living in the United States.18
SECOND. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 — 1945), who had been President of the United States since 1933, brought the United States out of the "great depression" before his mysterious death (he was elected 4 times, because at that time in the United States there were no restrictions on the number of terms in office). He was not a bureaucrat himself, but he was forced to "pasture" the bureaucracy of the US government.19 One of his main economic advisers (since 1937) was John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 — 2006) — an outstanding macroeconomist, theorist and practitioner, whose views are not in demand in the United States to this day, which creates a lot of social and economic problems for them. Roosevelt's team, having gained state power, was faced with a choice: either a revolutionary situation will ripen in the United States and a Marxist revolution will be organized with all its truly nightmarish consequences in the form of widespread rampant banditry and mass abuse of power by the American Cheka to combat counterrevolution and sabotage, or his team will change the mode of functioning of the country's political and economic system so that the class conflict will be resolved for a fairly long time. They were able to do the second, although some representatives of the business community and "intellectuals" of the United States are still convinced that Roosevelt is a secret Communist and a traitor to American interests. Nevertheless, as can be seen from the statistics shown above, before the Roosevelt team came to power, the US GDP was progressively declining, and unemployment was growing, and the unemployed were not only incompetent drunks, but also highly qualified professionals, both workers and engineers, and other specialists with higher education.20
THIRD. The Russian Empire in the period from 1914 to 1920 was transformed into the USSR. The official goal of Soviet policy was to put into practice the principle of "from each according to his ability to each according to his need", which Ayn Rand condemned. This goal was not achieved, but by the time the novel "Atlas shrugged" was published, the USSR had become a super-state — the second economy in the world. The pace of scientific and technological development and production growth in the USSR in the first half of the 1950s was such that Western experts were convinced that the USSR could become an uncontested hegemon in world politics and economy by the early 1980s, provided that the country maintained the pace of development it had achieved under the leadership of J. Stalin.‑‑21 Under the rule of a symbiosis of freemasonry and the bolsheviks led by J. Stalin the backbone of the Russian Empire became the number 2 superpower because in the USSR during the time of Stalinist Bolshevism, economic and cultural planning was not done by idiots (as in the "people's republics" in the world of Ayn Rand), and opportunities were opened for creative initiatives and competition of ideas and solutions both in the public sector of the economy and in the cooperative sector.2223 That is, the USSR was qualitatively different from the fictional Ayn Rand’s "people's republics".
As for the Russian Empire, in contrast to the USSR, the state power almost did not interfere in the affairs of private entrepreneurs, and state-owned factories (the public sector) competed with private ones, and private owners competed with each other. This competition in its historical development looked like this.
The Rafailovich clan (Jews who converted to Orthodoxy) in the 1820s (with the support of the commander of the black sea fleet from 1816 to 1833 A. S. Greig at the suggestion of his mistress Lia Stalinskaya) became a monopolist in the construction of warships for the black sea fleet. While state-owned shipyard on the Black sea, though possessing the necessary production facilities, had not been loaded with orders and idled for years, and the cost of ships built in the shipyards of the Rafailovich, were three times higher than the cost of similar ships built at government shipyards in St. Petersburg and Arkhangelsk, and the quality as manifested in the life of the ships — was significantly lower.24
Decades passed, serfdom was abolished. Competition and "creative" activities of domestic entrepreneurs continued in the same spirit: look at the materials of the investigation of the Tsar's train crash in Borki in 1887. As a result, by the beginning of the first world war, the Russian Empire was still populated mainly by ignorant uneducated people, which is why it did not have many advanced high-tech industries for that time: machine-tool and tool industry, aircraft construction, automobile manufacturing, production of ball and roller bearings, optical industry, radio-electronic industry, power engineering, managerially sound system of standardization, providing high rates of scientific and technological progress, etc. The production culture was at such a low level that it was not possible to reproduce with the proper level of quality even licensed analogues of foreign products, the production of which required any high technologies and organizational and technological discipline.25 There were exceptions to this general rule, but they did not define the face of the Russian economy.
Further, at the end of the Empire, during the first world war, shortly before the start of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917, private "Putilov factories" were taken under state control, because they were unable to fulfill their obligations on the volumes and terms of delivery of military products ordered by them.26 The community of Industrialists and private entrepreneurs in general profited from military orders, supplying the front and rear with unknown things, and in fact sabotaging the conduct of the war.27
The USSR, by the time of the novel "Atlas shrugged" for 40 years after the revolutions of 1917, (in contrast to the degraded "people's republics" of Ayn Rand) had achieved sovereignty in scientific and technical terms and in many respects set the world's level of technology: recall that in the year of the novel "Atlas shrugged", the first satellite in the world was launched in the USSR; and this is despite the fact that all the rocket men of the third Reich worked in the United States, and the losses in the war were mainly young people, and even earlier - organized by the Trotskyists — "ezhovschina", aimed at mowing down high-level professionals of all levels and fields of activity, significantly undermined the intellectual and professional potential of our country.
This undeniable achievement of the transformation of the backward empire in the USSR was the result of a planned national economy and planned development of culture. Periods of economic ruin after the civil war and intervention, and after the Victory in the great Patriotic war was short by historical standards (including in relation to the "great depression" in the U.S. and devastation in the UK at the end of the second world war), due to the fact that adequate planning in both cases allowed the country to emerge from the devastation in the shortest possible time.
But along with this by the early 1950s the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union emerged as a social class, the class, exploitative, parasitic, and in the post-Stalin era (when there introduced a regime of irresponsibility for the results assigned to the case), that began to do something that is described in Ayn Rand's novel, to manage the economy without proper knowledge and skills is one of the main reasons for the subsequent stop of scientific and technical progress, problems in the economy that led the USSR to collapse.‑ And post-Soviet Russia managed by "Soviet bureaucracy" led by President Yeltsin in the 1990s was brought to the state of "people's republics" from the novel Ayn Rand: they could not live without humanitarian food aid from abroad during the degradation and devastation in their agriculture and industry.‑ The same applies to the bureaucracy of other post-Soviet States. But what is described in this paragraph at the time of publication the "Atlas" had not yet become a history asset. However, Ayn Rand is not a prophet or a pioneer of the destructive properties of bureaucracy, and therefore the novel "Atlas shrugged" is not a revelation of a visionary, shedding light on this previously obscure side of life. Long before it, K. Marx, O. Bismarck, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, V. I. Shestakov, V. Lenin, J. Stalin, L. Trotsky, M. Gilas wrote about the essence of bureaucracy and the need to eradicate it.
FOURTH. The third Reich, which emerged from the ruins of the "Weimar Republic", which was exemplary in terms of freedom of private enterprise and freedom of trade, also built a state-planned economy. The third Reich was built by scoundrels, but they were not idiots. Therefore, the economy of the third Reich was so effective in ensuring military operations on many fronts extending several thousand kilometers that the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition had to fight with the Reich and the "European Union 1" for 4 years (if we count from June 22, 1941, and not from the Reich's defeat of Poland in September 1939 and the subsequent "strange war" of France and Great Britain against the Reich). And after the victory over the Reich, the allies for the next 10 years or so studied and mastered the scientific and technical achievements of Hitler's Germany, which had no analogues in their own cultures.
But the emergence and development of the third Reich as a powerful power was possible primarily due to the fact that the economic system of the "Weimar Republic", with all the freedom of private enterprise and free trade in it, was close to the economies of the "people's republics" from the novel by Ayn Rand. Of course, the peace of Versailles made a certain contribution to the difficult economic situation of the Weimar Republic, but the liberal-market economy made a much greater contribution to it.28 And this is despite the fact that the Germans at that time of history were not lazy and incompetent in their work, and their science and engineering subcultures were among the best in the world. With this potential, it was easier to build the Reich than to create and develop the USSR, because the coverage of the German population with education was many times wider and higher than the population of the Russian Empire, which after the NSDAP came to power in 1933, led by Hitler, and allowed Germany to recreate military and economic power for several years and cross the Versailles peace Treaty.
And the happiness of all those who live today is that the behind-the-scenes bosses of the West managed to provoke the third Reich to start a world war in 1939 - before the Reich was able to create a high-quality scientific,technical and military-economic superiority over the bourgeois "democracies" of the West.
4. The main idea of the novel and true life
However, the plot of the novel "Atlas shrugged" is not the main thing in itself. Subjects of literary works of socio-philosophical orientation are a means to demonstrate the viability of various kinds of ideas that underlie the life of society or claim such a status. The main idea of "Atlanta shrugged" is expressed in a monologue — a speech by John Galt on the radio. Having an overwhelming scientific and technical superiority over the official state of the United States, John Galt disconnected from the air a high-ranking state bureaucrat who was going to speak to the people and spoke himself, and the bureaucrats could not disable him from the air... a fragment of this speech below, comments in the footnotes to the italicized text in the quote:
"Just as a person cannot exist without a body, so rights cannot exist without the right to implement them — to think, to work, to dispose of the results of labor, which means the right to property. The modern power mystics who offered you the false choice of human rights or property rights have made one last ludicrous attempt to revive the old juxtaposition of body and soul. Only a ghost can do without property, only a slave works without the right to the product of his labor. The doctrine of the superiority of human rights over property rights simply means that some can turn others into property. Since the skilled will get nothing from the unskilled, this means the right of the incapable to dispose of the capable and use them as draft animals.29 Anyone who considers this state of affairs normal for a person does not have the right to the title of a person.
The source of property rights is the law of cause and effect. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man's labor and mind. Just as there are no effects without causes, there is no wealth without its source i.e. intelligence.30 The intellect cannot be made to work, those who can think do not think under compulsion, and those who agree to it create no more than the price of the whip that they are driven with. You can not assign the product of intellectual labor except on the terms of its owner, only by exchange and voluntary consent.31 A different approach is the approach of bandits, no matter how many of them there are. Criminals live in the present day and starve to death in the absence of victims, just as you are now suffering from hunger, those who believed that crime could be justified if the government legalized banditry and condemned resistance to banditry. The only true purpose of government is to protect human rights, which means to protect them from physical violence.32 The real government is just a police and it acts as a tool of self-defense for a person. As such, it can only use force against those who first used force. The only governmental agencies should remain: the police — to protect against internal criminals, the army — to protect against external criminals, the courts — to protect property and contracts from encroachments, violations and fraud, and to resolve disputes on a reasonable basis in accordance with objective laws.
But a government that is the first to use force against its citizens resorting to non-violence, and that suppresses unarmed people by force of arms, is a hellish machine that destroys morals. Such a government perverts its purpose and has no moral justification, it switches from the role of protector to the role of mortal enemy of the person with the role of the police to the role of a criminal, having the right to use violence against victims deprived of the right to self-defense. Instead of a moral law, this government sets a rule of social behavior: you can do whatever you want with your neighbor, if your group is bigger and stronger. Only a dullard, a half-wit, or a coward is willing to live on such terms, willing to give up their rights to their own life and mind, willing to accept that others can dispose of them at their own discretion and whim. They readily agree that the will of the majority is unquestionable, that physical strength and numerical superiority are superior to truth, law, and reality.33 We are people of reason and mutually beneficial exchange, we are not masters or slaves, we do not issue or accept bearer checks. We do not accept any form of irrationality.
As long as in the savage times people had no idea of objective reality, as long as they believed that the physical world was subject to the will and whims of unknowable spirits and demons, neither thought, science, nor production were possible. Only when people discovered that the world is stable, predictable, it became possible to rely on knowledge, plan actions, anticipate the future, and people began to gradually leave the caves. But today you have again given modern industry, with all its boundless complexity and precise scientific calculation, to the power of unknowable demons, to the unpredictable will, to the capricious arbitrariness of unknown, disgusting, insignificant officials.
A farmer will not work in the spring and summer if he cannot foresee what he will get in the fall. And you hope that industrial giants who plan production for years to come, invest with future generations in mind, and sign contracts for ninety-nine years can still function and produce products without knowing what random order that has appeared in the head of a capricious official, at some unknown moment, will destroy all their long-term efforts. Tramps and loafers plan for no more than a day. The higher is the mind, the higher is his horizon. A man whose horizon is grounded, ready to build on quicksand, ready to snatch what turns up, and to not think about the consequences. A person whose horizon is raised by skyscrapers will not do this. But he will not consent to give ten years of unremitting labor to the creation of a new product, knowing that a gang of entrenched incompetents will juggle the laws to damage it, tie it hand and foot, in every possible way press and doom it to failure. But as soon as he turns against them, as soon as he succeeds in his business, they are already on the alert and deprive him of both fame and fortune. Look a little ahead beyond your own nose. You shout about your fears, about not wanting to compete with people of higher intelligence, you declare that their minds are a threat to your existence, that the strong do not leave a chance for the weak in the market of free exchange of values. What determines the material value of your work? Only the creative effort of your mind — if you were living on a desert island. The worse your brain works, the less physical labor gives you. You can spend your entire life performing the same operation, harvesting a miserable crop, or hunting with a bow and arrow, without seeing beyond that. But living in a rationally organized society, where free exchange is possible, you get an invaluable gain: the material value of your work is determined not only by your personal efforts, but also by the efforts of the best minds living with you in your world.
When you work in a modern factory, you are paid not only for your work, but also for the creative genius that created this factory: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who took risks and invested his accumulated capital in a new, unknown business, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines that you control, for the work of the inventor who invented the product that is now coming out of your hands, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that made this product possible, for the work of the philosopher who taught people to think and whom you incessantly denounce.34
A machine, a frozen form of active intelligence, is a force that increases the potential of your life, making your time more productive and rich. If you had worked as a blacksmith in the middle ages, so beloved by mystics, all your productivity would have been limited to an iron strip forged by you after much work — and you would have been paid only for this strip. How many rails will you produce per work shift at Hank Rearden's factories?35 Do you have the heart to say that your earnings are created only by your physical labor and that these rails are the product of your muscles? The blacksmith's standard of living is all your muscles are worth, and the rest is Hank Rearden's gift. Each person is free to rise in the growth of his abilities and will, but only the height that his thought reaches determines the level of his ascent. Physical labor as such is limited by the scope of the moment. A person engaged exclusively in physical labor consumes as much as he invests in the production process, and leaves no other values either for himself or for others. But the person who generates ideas in any field, the person who creates new knowledge, is a constant benefactor of humanity. You can't share a material product, it belongs to some end user, only an idea can be shared with an unlimited number of people, and all of them will become richer from this, without sacrificing anything, without losing anything, only increasing the productivity of the labor they are engaged in. A powerful intellect transfers the value of its time to the weak, giving them the opportunity to work in the jobs created by their minds, and devotes their time to new discoveries. This is a mutually beneficial exchange. The interests of reason are united and do not depend on the level of intelligence, this is the case among people who love work, do not seek and do not expect what they have not earned with their work.
In relation to the expenditure of mental energy, a person who has created something new receives only a small percentage of the value he has created, regardless of what fortune he will make on it, what millions he will earn. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory that produces this invention gets an exorbitant amount in relation to the mental effort that his work requires of him. And this is true of all people, at all levels of pretension and ability. The person who is at the top of the intellectual pyramid makes the greatest contribution to all those who are below him, but receives nothing but material remuneration, no intellectual remuneration, and does not increase the value of his time. The person at the bottom of the pyramid, who, if left to his own, would starve because of his incompetence, makes no contribution at all to the top of the pyramid, but receives surcharges from all the minds above his own.
This is the nature of "competition" between the intellectually strong and the weak. This is the model of "exploitation" for which you curse the strong.36 That's what we did for you with joy and pleasure. What did we ask in response? Nothing but freedom. What we wanted from you was freedom of action — freedom to think and work as you see fit, freedom to take risks and take responsibility, freedom to make a profit and make a fortune, freedom to rely on your rationality, to put your creations on your court for free sale, freedom to rely on the objective value of your work and your ability to appreciate it, to rely on your intelligence and honesty, freedom to deal exclusively with your mind. This is the price we asked for and which you rejected as too high. You have decided that it is not fair that we own palaces and yachts, that we are the ones who pulled you out of the slums, gave you housing with all the comforts, gave you radio, movies, cars. You think that you have a right to a salary, but we don't have a right to profit, that you don't need us to deal with your mind, that it's better to show us a gun. And to this we replied: damn you! What happened: you are cursed (highlighted in bold when quoting)."
This is an idyll of entrepreneurs:
Society consists only of highly gifted always and everywhere right-wing entrepreneurs who have the right to wealth, and the rest should admire the genius of entrepreneurs and be content with what the community of entrepreneurs will provide them on a residual basis. This also applies to the state authorities, which should be subordinate to the community of entrepreneurs.
But there are no such societies. In the second half of the XIX century, the United States generally lived in the absence of any restrictions on business activities. We can say that there were only four fundamentally significant legal restrictions on the activities of entrepreneurs: 1) the obligation to pay taxes, 2) the prohibition to deliberately murder employees committed by methods that are not part of the technological process of the enterprise, 3) the prohibition to steal other people's property, 4) the prohibition to seize other people's property by robbery, i.e. by threatening to kill or harm health, committed by methods that are not part of the technological process of the enterprise.37
The US Congress analyzed the results of the country's life in the conditions of such legal regulation of the activities of entrepreneurs.
"In 1880, the average cost of living was $ 720 a year, and the annual average salary of industrial workers was about $ 300 a year. At the same time, the average working day was 11 — 12 hours, and often even 15. One in six children worked in industry, receiving half of an adult's salary for the same job (italics when quoting: Ayn Rand fans, what's the equality in this?). No one knew what labor protection was. All these data are taken from the report of the Bureau of labor statistics submitted to the US Congress. At the end, this conclusion says: "people must die in order for the industry to thrive."38
In Ayn Rand's terms, what is said in the paragraph above is fair, since it expresses the principles of "free exchange" of the commodity "labor force" (professionalism and willingness to work) for the goods produced, represented by wages, since the unfair order of things is characterized by the same previously highlighted bold words: "You decided: it's not fair that we own palaces and yachts, we are the ones who pulled you out of the slums, gave you housing with all the amenities, gave you radio, movies, cars. You think that you have a right to a salary, but we don't have a right to profit, that you don't need us to deal with your mind, that it's better to show us a gun. And to this we replied: damn you! That's what happened: you are cursed."
You must also pay attention to another feature of the novel "Atlas shrugged": there are no children characters, all the characters are adults in one way or another as people, though I remember some episodes from his childhood: everything is either held in the form of rascals, are not able to do business, or held as high professionals. But in order for all of them to take place in their capacity, it was necessary that they had a childhood and that they grew up, received a certain upbringing and education.
If Ayn Rand were alive, she could be offered another storyline that would expose the failure of the main idea of her novel. Let one of the ordinary workers give birth to a gifted child, but the family's earnings are not enough to give him the highest education that he is able to master, and in addition to everything, his father becomes disabled due to an accident at the enterprise or as a result of occupational diseases when the child is 12 years old. And along with it the family a brilliant entrepreneur — industry magnate who owns not only the companies, bringing his business income, but also yachts and mansions one the coasts of both oceans surrounding US, simultaneously gives birth to a son with a Down syndrom (or injured at birth) a child who, due to dementia can not learn education allowing to continue his father's work; he is interested in and only sculpt "the cakes" in the sandbox with young children, and this heir is the only one in the tycoon family. What happens to the business when the tycoon dies?39 What will grow up from the son of a hard worker who has become disabled?
Below are photos from the 1900s on the issue of "Child labor in the United States": cotton harvesting; children at the machines in a spinning factory (note: the drive belt of the machine without a protective cover, i.e. children work in traumatic conditions); girls-seamstresses at work (note: local lighting in the workplace is turned off, and daylight is clearly not enough — harm to health is inevitable); boys at the mine.
For the principles of organizing society, which Ayn Rand, represented by John Galt, considers fair and best, child labor (including in unhealthy conditions) is normal; it is also normal to pay it at low rates and increased fines.40 But what is shown in the photos above is not the worst on this topic, including the work of children in the faces of mines. In fact, the children of the numerous poor for the reality of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and for Ayn Rand are an economic resource to which the norms of ethics of the "elite" do not apply.
Of course, Ayn Rand is right that:
The creative potential of people is the main value of society because only as a result of creativity mistakes of the past are corrected and society is developed.
But in order for mistakes to be corrected and society to develop, the human creator must be righteous. Ayn Rand did not mention this, but raised selfishness to the rank of righteousness, giving it to all the geniuses in her novel. But to ascribe to the rank of righteousness the unrighteousness that gave rise to the liberal market economy with all its generators of problems, social and personal disasters, is folly.
But if in a liberal-market economy parents receive a poor salary, child labor becomes widespread. And since there is also a child component in unemployment, children who are not employed either at school (especially if it is commercial) or at any enterprise, go into crime. In any case, children who are not employed at school or at work cannot receive an education that corresponds to their personal development potential, as a result of which the liberal-market socio-economic organization of life massively destroys the creative potential of many people, i.e. it does what Ayn Rand so condemns in the novel "Atlas shrugged". This is a clear expression of schizophrenia…
5. The charm of the "Atlas..." as a result of dementia and ignorance
Pay attention:
Ayn Rand did not confirm the viability of her graphomania either as a manufacturing entrepreneur, as a financial entrepreneur, or as a statesman of the historically real United States of America. That is, her works are not artistic or philosophical works based on her personal life, but "fabrications".
Not having an "insider" view of these areas of activity, she was content to "censor" in her inner world "mirages" and "echoes" that reached her from objective reality, and on this basis fantasized about the life of society. Therefore, her concept of "righteous selfishness" is vitally untenable. We will explain this inconsistency on some details of the plot, which her fans do not pay attention to or which treat uncritically.
So in her "Atlantis", where the "Atlanteans" — the "disappeared" most effective entrepreneurs — are concentrated, Aladdin with a lamp, in which the Genie who fulfills Aladdin's wishes lives, or old Hottabych, imbued with the ideas of Ayn Rand and John Galt, is absolutely necessary as residents; or in the valley it is necessary to grow flowers on an industrial scale-semitsvetiki41, but their "genius geneticist" "Vavilov", who would bring them out of the usual field chamomile, is also not in the plot of the novel.
The reason for our irony in relation to the description of "Atlantis" is that effective entrepreneurs "disappeared" from society and some disappeared intellectuals and artists live in a mountain valley (referred to in the novel "Atlantis") at high standards of consumption, which in the organizational and technological culture of the United States of the late 1920s-the first half of the 1930s, it is impossible to create without the labor of a sufficiently large working class — both industrial and agricultural. But no representative of the working class or labor farming is presented to the reader when describing the prosperity of the "disappeared" geniuses of entrepreneurship in the valley.42 Of course, those are "unpoor" people there, because cars, planes, tractors and their attachments, building materials or building kits of houses, production equipment and household appliances can be delivered there as needed from the outside world in relation to the valley. However, it would be necessary to solve the problem of neutralizing secret carriers from among those who participated in the delivery of goods to Atlantis and in the construction of various objects in it, but according to the ideologists of the project, those who are not worthy to live in it.
In addition, Atlantis also has production facilities that cannot be created and maintained on the basis of individual labor. In particular, it mentions a copper mine and a copper smelter owned by one of the activists of the policy of "disappearance" of the most effective entrepreneurs — Francisco d'Anconia. And he needs copper to sell to Hank Rearden, because it is one of the necessary ingredients in the production of his miracle alloy.43 At the same time, according to the plot of the novel, Francisco runs around the world, playing tricks, presenting himself to society as a crazy playboy ("silver spooner"), who can not squander the richest inheritance of his ancestors. But with such a life in the world outside the valley, Francisco would not have had the time or energy to even manage the construction and operation of the mine and copper smelter, let alone create them alone. But another genius already mentioned — Hank Rearden — in the same valley, also single-handedly created the capacity to produce his miracle alloy. And Dagny Taggart, established in the world outside of the valley as a railway genius, while on a tour of the valley ponders plans for the construction of a railway necessary to serve the local production of Francisco and Hank. Does she also intend to build a railway, even a narrow-gauge railway, alone in the future?44
There is no working class, and automated robots are not mentioned in the novel: to create and produce them, the science and technology of the fictional Ayn Rand world have not yet matured, and John Galt somehow did not pay attention to this, for all his "romantic genius". At the same time, we note that for 12 years John Galt has been working as a track worker on the railroad, the Vice-President of the Board of Directors is Dagny Taggart, and this means that every day except weekends and vacations, John Galt must work on the railroad, and therefore he cannot have free time to constantly do some business in Atlantis and wander around the States, persuading entrepreneurs to disappear.
Does it appear that Ayn Rand didn't mention that there were slaves in the valley who worked for the "disappeared" geniuses of entrepreneurship? Or did she not find it necessary to show everyone highly professional locksmiths or "uncle Toms" and many of his friends who were attached to the "disappeared" project managers, because, although they are not "brilliant entrepreneurs" and inventors, but they took place as lower-level workers in the organization of the economic system? But if these people are not in the valley, then the story cannot do without the magic flower that fulfills any desires in "Atlantis", because individual entrepreneurs and intellectuals who have retrained in electricians, "watchmen", etc. can not solve the problem of the absence of the working class…45
As noted, the children in the novel were left somewhere behind the scenes, and in the "Atlantis" valley, only some of its inhabitants have families, which also does not make the valley very promising.
A direct transition from the technosphere to a biological civilization, free from the need to maintain and develop the technosphere, was beyond Ayn Rand's knowledge and dreams.
Another "little thing", also not understood by fans of Ayn Rand, including business coaches. Dagny Taggart, being in the valley, in order not to be a boarder in accordance with her convictions and beliefs of the local inhabitants (everyone makes money himself, as he can, and pays for itself, without asking anything and, especially, not demanding from others), took on the mission of a housekeeper in John Galt's house.46 At the end of her temporary stay there, John Galt, as an employer, paid her a month's salary, minus the payment for food and accommodation in his house ($1.5 per day): Dagny received a $ 5 gold coin.
The fact that the coin is gold is a "stone" against F. D. Roosevelt, during whose presidency in the United States restrictions were imposed on US residents to own gold, and gold coins were withdrawn from circulation. But for Ayn Rand and her characters who live in the valley, gold and silver are supposedly the only real and non-alternative permanent values on which monetary circulation should be built in a right (according to Ayn Rand) society.47 But in this case, we are not interested in the question of the usefulness or harmfulness of resuming the circulation of gold coins as "a well-known reliable means of protecting society from inflation."48 We are interested in something else.
If the monthly salary of a low-skilled employee in the valley is $ 5, minus food and accommodation at the employer's home, this means that the daily free budget of such an employee is 16 cents, and a few more cents are spent on excess spending and savings.49 If the smallest coin is 1 cent, then, since spending in this case can only be multiples of 1/16 of the daily budget, with a salary of 5 dollars, there will be problems with the price list. It would be vital to make sure that Ayn Rand had set the salary after deducting the mandatory expenses for food and accommodation at least $ 20, or at a $ 5 salary casually mentioned the "micro cent" coin — 1/1000 of a cent. But she wanted to show an efficient economy in which $ 5 is quite "big money". However, Ayn Rand "didn't catch up on the change."
To see what Ayn Rand's mistake is, we recall that before the beginning of perestroika, the minimum wage in the USSR was 60 rubles, the cost of food is about 1 — 1.5 rubles a day (30 — 45 rubles a month), the state rent for a 4-room apartment is within 5 rubles a month, including gas, water, and electricity. With this salary, the daily budget in a 30-day month is 2 rubles. 2 rubles is 200 kopecks of total expenses, or from 50 kopecks to 1 ruble per day of available funds (minus food expenses). Spending within these two rubles can be multiples of 1/200 of the daily budget. And the cost of shoes and clothing in those days generally allowed one person to live on a 60-ruble salary, provided that he has a place in a hostel, an apartment or office housing at the place of work. It was possible to live in the hostel even on a 40-ruble student scholarship. The possibility of spending at this level of monthly income is proven by the practice of the USSR.
Now imagine that you live with free funds remaining after mandatory (non-alternative) expenses — 160 rubles a day, and that the smallest bill is 100 rubles, and there are no coins or bills of smaller denomination at all. This means that all prices and expenses less than 100 rubles are impossible. That is, bread costs not 40 — 60 rubles, but from 100 rubles and above; a dozen eggs costs not 40 — 70 rubles, but from one hundred rubles and more; tariffs for using public transport start from 100 rubles (i.e. it is impossible to go two ways anywhere for 160 rubles) , etc. This will be the full equivalent of the 5 dollars remaining from the monthly salary after mandatory payments, and living on 16 cents of free funds per day.
This means that either Dagny Taggart was paid by her employer — a "fighter for justice" — John Galt a beggarly salary, which is only enough for food and rented housing, but in the annual cycle will not even be enough to renew clothes and shoes. That is, it is impossible to live on this salary because of its insufficient purchasing power, and Dagny in the valley is really in the position of a slave, not a guest, and all socio-philosophical conversations about the meaning of life and its implementation simply obscure this fact.
Accordingly, Ayn Rand understood even less about the theory and practice of financial system organization than a street peddler. The latter is true because the novel does not have complaints about receiving beggarly $ 5 a month after completing mandatory payments. This means that comparing her level of understanding of Economics and Finance with the level of understanding of a traveling street vendor in the third section of this note is a compliment to Ayn Rand.
In life, there can be no price list that allows you to implement a daily budget with a minimum salary sufficient for life, if the minimum expenditure within the daily budget of funds remaining after mandatory payments is equal to its 1/16th part. Even the monetary reform in the USSR in 1961, before which the minimum wage was several hundred rubles and after which it was reduced by one zero and became several tens of rubles, was perceived by the population painfully, since street vendors sold dill both for 20 kopecks before the reform, and it continued to cost 20 kopecks thereafter.50 The nominal values of prices, nominal expressions of salaries and other incomes, and their ratios are mutually related, so the minimum possible expenditure and its purchasing power are one of the most important characteristics of the financial climate in the country, since all prices and salaries are multiples of this technically possible minimum expenditure.51 For the same reason, in the distant past, when the purchasing power of a kopeck turned out to be excessively large, there were fractions of a kopeck — half.52 But Ayn Rand and her admirers do not know this and much more about the structure of the monetary system. Therefore, they elevate fables-fictions to the rank of authenticity…
Now we will talk about the main problem of the "ideal" (according to Ayn Rand) political and economic system implemented both in "Atlantis" and in the United States-be it fictional Ayn Rand, or the real United States of pre-Roosevelt times.
There is a well-known drawing that is present in almost all textbooks of economic theory describing the market economy. One of its versions is reproduced on the left. If we leave aside the issue of productive capacity, enabling use of products, and the question about the factors that enable consumption of natural goods, believing them sufficient to supply the market of any volume Q of a certain good, then the essence of this pattern is simple: the higher the volume of supply of a certain good on the market — the lower the price, which can be sold the entire amount of this good for sale, with limited purchasing power of the market. In general, those are the comments on figures of this type in textbooks of economic theory Therefore, let's look at what is left in the defaults of textbooks.
Comments to the figure:
1. In the vast majority of cases, the textbooks talk about "products" and not "benefits". The difference is that products are produced, and goods can be both products and natural goods, which can also fall into the pricing algorithm in society for various reasons (a shortage of certain natural goods in relation to requests for their use, or legislators have made exorbitant intellectual efforts and set tariffs for their use). And if this figure is any amount of demand and supply Q can "draw" in real life for its production and delivery to market needs to be production and logistics (transport and storage) of power, resulting in the displacement of Q to the right with respect to the maximum, provide the existing production and logistics facilities require some time and costs of heterogeneous resources and control the creation of new capacity needed for increasing demand and supply by the amount ΔQ. And this management goes beyond the industry, which after some time will have to produce some good in the amount of Q+ΔQ, since the creation of new capacities is the work of many other industries, either within their existing production capabilities, or on the basis of increasing their production capacities and production volumes, too.
2. Salary is the price of "labor", i.e. the price of a certain professionalism and moral readiness to work. Accordingly, if the economy is in demand for a certain number of professions, pricing in the labor market will provide high salaries for carriers of scarce professions and low salaries for carriers of mass professions; the price of unclaimed knowledge and skills and professionalism based on them (as well as many inventions) in this system is zero.53 Let's assume that the figure C1 shows the salary of a large category of professionals, and C2 is the level of salary that allows the family to provide full nutrition, healthy living conditions and life, and children to receive an education that corresponds to their genetic development potential. That is, in a system idealized by Ayn Rand, a lot of children are doomed to grow up incompetent, who in the future will not have a place in high-tech science-intensive production because they were not given a proper education. And then comes the next "John Galt" or Alice from "Alice in Wonderland" (Ayn Rand) and they will start to blame that they are parasites because they are not suitable for work in a modern economy, but want to consume more than their low pay and want their children to grow up and live like human beings and not survived they deserve "justice", established the objective nature of pricing in the market of labor and goods markets. Then there will be someone else who will go beyond "John Galt" and Alice, and say: If they are dissatisfied and do not want to work for the system's proposed "fair salary, objectively established by the labor market and commodity markets", then send all dissatisfied people to concentration camps, and if someone starts to rebel, then destroy them as terrorists and state traitors.
3. Now let's look at the same figure from two more points of view at the same time: 1) from the point of view of a manufacturing entrepreneur who wants his enterprise to be financially sustainable in the long term, and 2) from the point of view of a statesman who wants everyone in society to be fed, clothed, and live in healthy living conditions, so that all children receive education and upbringing that allows them to fully realize their innate creative potential for the benefit of society and humanity as a whole. Let's assume that Q1 is the volume of production at which the needs of society for a certain good make it possible to realize the stated goals of a statesman. This volume of production corresponds to the price of this good C1. However, under the current market conditions, the threshold of zero profitability of production of this good is C2. Accordingly, it is impossible to produce this benefit in a volume greater than Q2 in this political and economic system, since otherwise most of the production capacity of the relevant industry will go bankrupt. In reality, this means that the capacity that is chronically excess for production in volumes greater than Q2 will be eliminated in order to reduce non-production costs, and no private investors will invest in the creation of additional capacity to achieve the volume of supply of the Q1 benefit. But if the industry produces this benefit in a volume less than Q1, providing positive profitability, the goals of public policy will not be achieved. And if the statesman did not make a mistake in setting the minimum volume of production and consumption of this good at the level of Q1, then the society will inevitably suffer some damage in the production of this good in a volume less than Q2, up to the end of its existence.
Administratively, this means that:
• within the industry, price is a measure of product quality compared to competitors ' products (the higher the quality from the consumer's point of view, the higher the price can be raised);
• at the level of the macroeconomic system of a sovereign state as a whole, price is a measure of the shortage of products in relation to the needs of society as such, it restricts requests for consumption by statistical distribution of the always limited total purchasing power of the company in the "wallets" of individuals and legal entities. I.e. the price list for products of final consumption is a financial expression of all errors in self-controlling of the society within the boundaries of the state, and therefore in ideal socio-economic self-controlling the price of anything for the end user is zero. However, the task of zeroing the price list does not have purely economic solutions, but is solved only as a result of the general cultural and, above all, moral and ethical development of society. In the aspect of economy, that its decision involves state control of the threshold of profitability of the sectors and regions the growth of production in accordance with the needs of society in the production and protection of effective demand from the factor, known in sociology of the West as "Maslow's pyramid", affects the growing purchasing power of the society in its nominal effective demand is redistributed between specialized markets and changes the general price list under the influence of the inequality of needs and, respectively, the requests of people and social groups to the consumption of products of different types and purposes.
We have considered the conflict of departments of different hierarchical levels on the example of only one good needed by society in the amount of Q1. But the real goal of state policy formulated as "that all were fed, clothed, lived in a healthy domestic environment, that all children received the education allowing them to fully realize the innate creative potential for the benefit of society and humanity as a whole" requires production and consumption not just a single benefit in the amount of Q1, but the production and consumption of a sufficient amount of each of the benefits in the composition of some set. In addition, in the process of social development and in the course of scientific and technological progress, the nomenclature of this set (its composition) and the requirements and characteristics of products for each item of the nomenclature will inevitably change. How to organize state macro-economic management that ensures the solution of the problem "so that everyone in society is fed, clothed, and lives in healthy living conditions, so that all children receive upbringing and education that allows them to fully realize their innate creative potential for the benefit of society and humanity as a whole". The characters of the novel and the objectivist philosophical movement led by Ayn Rand and her ideological successors have never been interested in this issue and are still not interested.
4. In addition, although this does not apply to the processes behind the above figure, scientific and technological progress in a liberal market economy is accompanied by the production of an "economically surplus" population:
• these people are not needed by the economy as workers because, first, the needs of society for vital products are limited; secondly, even in those specialized commodity markets where the needs of society are higher than the volume of products offered for sale, the effective demand for products is still limited, and no one will produce products in volumes exceeding the market's ability to buy it; and, thirdly, there is a factor already mentioned, known in Western sociology as the "Maslow pyramid".
• these people, who do not work and do not receive wages and legal permanent income, are not well-off as consumers, because they have nothing to contribute to the creation of effective demand.
Therefore, in societies with a liberal market economy, where scientific and technological progress takes place, there is always a problem of "recycling" the "economically surplus population". In England, during the first industrial revolution, this problem was solved unabashedly simply: the law on vagrancy and the gallows for vagrants; in our days — more elegantly: drugs, depression and suicide, sexual perversions, expensive medicine.
For Ayn Rand and John Galt, this is all normal and fair (wages below the level that ensures the full life of families and the development of children, production volumes below the level of the needs of a fully developing society, production of an "economically surplus" population and its utilization), because they are far from the base of the consumption pyramid. But those whose fates suffer this damage will inevitably have a desire to eliminate this political and economic system, and possibly along with its adherents and defenders. And if there are effective riot managers among the discontented, the system will be swept away. Whether such "geniuses" like"John Galts" and "Ayn Rands" will survive is an open question, but if any of them die, they will not be pitied (even as "innocent dead" geniuses of science and technology): there will be no one to evaluate them due to the mass lack of culture of society, deceived by the liberal-market political and economic system that is so kind to their souls.
The result of a successful rebellion is an non-viable "people's Republic" in the style described by Ayn Rand or "the third Reich version 2" or "RSFSR-2" ; it depends on whether the creators are policies that can resolve the internal conflict of the interests of second, third and fourth reviews of the figure, which shows the dependence of "Volume offers the good Price of sales"; and whether they will be able to organize and implement steadily trans-sectoral controlling (controlling of supra-sectoral level) in order to ensure its economic policy, the need for which is noted in the comments 1.
• If they are intellectually developed scoundrels, you will get "the third Reich — version 2", and "Johns Galts" will be explained by fuhrers that in addition to the sphere of private enterprise, there is a policy in which "brilliant professionals" — "saviors of the fatherland" also work, and "John Galts", with rare exceptions, recognize their "rightness"; they also recognize that the politicians — fuhrers of the Reich — are not "parasites"-demagogues, as they thought before, but defenders and guides to life mostly of the interests of "johns galt". And this was the case in the third Reich: Porsche, Messerschmidt, Heinkel, Krupp, Mannesmans, Siemens, Schacht, Flick, Rechling, Speer, and others (see the 1930s caricatures on the left) are all German "johns galt", as Ayn Rand might have guessed for herself.
• If the creators of the new state are bolsheviks, then the result will be "RSFSR 2" (and inevitably in the future on a global scale), and in this federation — after some time — neither the exploitation of "person by person" nor other abuses of power will be possible, since society will be transformed as a result of the moral, ethical, sensual and intellectual development of people.‑
6. Public welfare and scientific and methodological support of state and business controlling
However, despite the obvious frailty of the socio-political and economic organization "Atlantis" Ayn Rand in the novel uses the term "public welfare", "welfare of society" only in the negative sense as a void, playing the role of "gangster slogan" (definition from the novel) by which politicians, bureaucrats, statesmen fool the society in her fictional world and our real one. What in life should be behind the words "public welfare"? — for 15 years of work on the novel, Ayn Rand had not bothered to think, as well as the politicians-bureaucrats whom she blamed. And this circumstance blurs any boundary between the parasitic bureaucrats she denounces and herself, along with the "geniuses" of entrepreneurship she deifies.
However, the answer to the question "what is the real (and not propagandistic) public good in life?» is not difficult.
Public welfare as a process includes the following control parameters:54
• Biocenoses in all regions retain their species diversity and there are no zones of environmental disasters either on land or in the waters of the oceans, seas and various types of reservoirs on land.
• The air is safe to breathe everywhere.
• In society in the succession of generations:
• a biologically healthy population is being reproduced;
• the birth rate and population flow between regions provide the population in all regions within the capacity of the ecological niches of each of them;
• everyone has enough food to be healthy throughout life within the biological resource of healthy organisms of the "Homo sapiens" species»;
• all have housing that ensures the health of residents and family development;
• the technosphere and the environment as a whole should be safe for people to work in the public association of work and family life, which requires foresight and thoughtfulness both at the level of public administration and at lower levels in the system, up to the actions of each person;
• all children are brought up in such a way that society is dominated by a single morality and ethics for all ethnic, social, professional, and age groups, which would ensure an internal harmony in the life of society (including the absence of parasitism on the work and life of others, and even more so — systematically organized parasitism, i.e. the exploitation of "person by person»);
• all children receive an education: 1) revealing the creative potential of each of them, 2) provide knowledge and skills to be culturally wealthy at the appropriate age, 3) allows you to learn new skills as the tide of scientific and technical progress, causing the uselessness of previously mastered professions, and also in cases of "burnout" when working in previously mastered professions, 4) in terms of reducing the economic necessity of employment under the influence of scientific-technical progress and the growth of labor productivity that allows the individual not to degrade nor idleness, nor by the admission of vices;
• and all this requires appropriate management and economic support both from the state government policy and from various personal and public initiatives, including business initiatives.
As can be seen from the above, the explanation of the concept of "public welfare", "welfare of the whole society", "welfare of the entire multinational humanity" is quite simple in its essence, although the words may be somewhat different.
However, for many individuals, the concept of "social welfare" can be difficult to master if they have preconceptions about the unrealistic dreams of "building Paradise on Earth", generated by:
• or their own thirst for parasitism on the work and life of others (dreams of Paradise on Earth for the "elite" and lumpen), due to the vices of morality,
• or consent to the status of a slave of the "elite" in the historically developed global civilization of our days, based on a system of organized mutual parasitism in social organization and parasitism of civilization as a whole on the Planet earth.
And if it weren't for the enslavement of selfishness, Ayn Rand had enough time in 15 years of writing the novel to think and guess what is the essence of real social welfare as a process that takes place in the continuity of generations. But in this case, it would face the question: how to achieve and ensure social well-being in the continuity of generations, if the historically established political and economic system of organizing the life of society not only fails to provide it, but also undermines it, constantly generating a biosphere-social ecological crisis and many conflicts both between states and within societies within states?
At the same time, she had the opportunity to meet and discuss the problems of entrepreneurial creativity and its integration into society, not with her fictional John Galt and his teacher, the philosopher Hugh Exton, but with real contemporaries who succeeded in entrepreneurship, economics, and politics, who saw the US burdened with problems that could not be solved on the basis of a liberal market economy.
In principle, she could have met with Henry Ford I, a truly brilliant industrial organizer who has established himself as an outstanding manager in several industries: as an automobile manufacturer (this is known to almost everyone), and in addition — as a railway worker and an aircraft manufacturer (few people know about these two hypostases of his).5556 However, in addition to books on industrial organization and ethics of private entrepreneurs in respect of the personnel of the enterprises and society as a whole, H. Ford wrote a book called "World Jewry" ("International Jewry") and a lot of articles belonging to him in the newspaper "the Dearborn independent" ("Independent Dirborn"), in which he expressed dissatisfaction with the contribution of the Jewish Diaspora in the life of nations and humanity as a whole, for which he was forced to apologize publicly under the threat of bringing his enterprises to bankruptcy (he did not control the macroeconomic level the US, but understood the feasibility of the threats).57 Therefore, communication with Mr. Ford for Alice Rosenbaum could be particularly unpleasant, as it is possible that for him too, but in solving problems of social significance, it is necessary to overcome prejudices and help other people to free themselves from prejudices and other vices.
So H. Ford's views on entrepreneurship and its relationship to public life did not coincide with the views of Ayn Rand. But unlike" fantasy" of "Atlant shrugged " the opinions of H. Ford are the results of his understanding of business practices, supported by the success of his activities in three sectors of the US economy. We will show this with excerpts from his book "My life and work»:
• H. Ford saw the meaning of entrepreneurship as serving society in meeting its needs for various kinds of products, and not "making money" for himself. And he decried the U.S. economy and government for not being sufficiently planned to ensure the well-being of all: "If I pursued only self-serving goals, I would not need to seek to change the established methods. If I only thought about acquiring things, the current system would be excellent for me: it provides me with an abundance of money. But I remember the duty of service. The present system does not give the highest measure of productivity, because it promotes waste in all its forms; it takes away the product of their labor from many people. It doesn't have a plan. It all depends on the degree of planning and feasibility."
• The basis for the happiness of people and societies, according to H. Ford, is not about making money (the main economic slogan of Ayn Rand), but conscientious creative work: "it is quite natural to work in the consciousness that happiness and well-being are obtained only by honest work. Human misfortunes are largely the result of trying to deviate from this natural path. I am not going to suggest anything that goes beyond the unconditional acceptance of this natural principle. I proceed from the assumption that we have to work. The success we have achieved so far is essentially the result of a logical conclusion: if we have to work, it is better to work intelligently and prudently; the better we work, the better we will be. This is what, in my opinion, elementary, common human sense prescribes to us."
• And accordingly, H. Ford crossed out the money-makers from the number of creators: "Communication with bankers (i.e., with usurers: our explanation when quoting) is a disaster for industry. Bankers <i.e. usurers> think only of monetary formulas. The factory is for them an institution for the production of money, not goods."
But in Ayn Rand's world, bankers are among the creative geniuses. Although the novel makes the statement: "Money itself is only a means of exchange, and it cannot exist outside the production of goods and people who know how to produce. Money gives weight and form to a basic principle: people who want to deal with each other must communicate through exchange, giving one value in return for another. In the hands of idlers and beggars who beg for the fruits of your labor with tears, or bandits who take them from you by force, money loses its meaning, ceases to be a means of exchange. Money became possible thanks to people who know how to produce," but nothing is said about the violation of this principle by usurers and the consequences of this violation for both producers and consumers.58 I.e. Ayn Rand really is protecting the global tyranny of usury and its owners, and that is the fact that deliberately promulgate her "philosophy of objectivism" on a global scale: some hired feet smart guys will not talk about it, fools won't realize it and will admire her and her works.
• H. Ford had a specific view on the parasitism of so-called "investors": "in my opinion, only people who are engaged in the business themselves, who consider the enterprise an instrument of service, and not a machine that makes money, have the right to be shareholders. If a large profit has been made — and work in accordance with the principle of service inevitably leads to this — it must be at least partially re-infused into the business in order for it to strengthen its service and partially return the profit to the buyers." "Investors", according to Ayn Rand, also refer to the number of creators without any stipulations.
• Ford treated his personnel at least as partners, and at most as comrades, but not as some faceless labor resource that must be stupidly subordinate and grateful to entrepreneurs for everything: "it is not customary to call an employee a companion, but still he is none other than a companion. Every business man, if he alone cannot manage the organization of his business, takes a companion (highlighted in the quotation), with whom he co- manage the affairs. Why is it that a manufacturer who also cannot handle production with his two hands refuses the title of companion to those whom he invites to help in production? Every business that requires more than one person to run it is a kind of PARTNERSHIP (highlighted by us when quoting). From the moment an entrepreneur engages people to help his business — even if it were a delivery boy — he chooses a companion. He himself may, it is true, be the sole owner of the tools and the sole master of the business; but only if he remains the sole manager and producer, can he claim complete independence. No one can be independent if they depend on the help of another. This relationship is always mutual — the boss is the companion of his worker, and the worker is the companion (we emphasize when quoting) of his boss; therefore, neither the former nor the latter, needless to say, is the only necessary one for the business. Both are necessary. If one pushes forward, pushing the other back, in the end, both sides suffer from it."
"The ambition of every employer should be to pay higher rates than all its competitors, and the desire of the workers should be to make this ambition practically easier to realize. There are, of course, workers in every industry who seem to assume that all super-production benefits only the entrepreneur.59 It is a pity that such a belief can take place at all. But it does exist, and may even be not unreasonable. If an entrepreneur forces his people to work as hard as they can, and they find out after a while that they don't get paid for it, then it's only natural that they start working with coolness again. If they see the fruits of their work in their paybook, and see proof that increased productivity means higher pay, they learn to understand that they are part of the enterprise, that the success of the business depends on them, and their well-being depends on the business."
And although the book is called "My life and work", H. Ford uses the personal pronoun "I" only in cases when it refers to himself. When it comes to his businesses, he uses the pronoun "WE" in all cases, although according to Ayn Rand H. Ford's criteria, he is a genius entrepreneur who belongs to the category that John Galt urged to "disappear".
• And at the same time, H. Ford is a committed connoisseur of creativity: "Things indicate bad business conduct when profits are squeezed out of workers or buyers. It should be given by a more skillful management of the affairs. Beware of degrading the product, beware of lowering wages and fleecing the public. More brain in your working method — brain and brain again! Work better than before, this is the only way to provide help and service for all countries. This can always be achieved."
• H. Ford saw personal development as the basis of progress: "The most important task of our senior staff is to develop managerial skills in other people." — Complete algorithm of controlling is impossible without creativity. Developing controlling abilities presupposes personal development of people. The inevitable consequence of personal development and the development of controlling abilities of all people is the vital instructions of subordinates to the mistakes of higher management, which requires a moral and ethical rejection of the concept of a personal hierarchy of virtues as the basis of social organization and the transition to a society based on common morality and ethics for all.
But H. Ford worked at the level of microeconomics. When he put forward his candidacy for President of the United States, "competent people" advised him not to do so and were so convincing that H. Ford withdrew his candidacy. It is possible that this fact allowed him to avoid the fate of A. Lincoln and J. Kennedy in the future.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 — 2006) could also have told a lot to Alice about economy, and about controlling it at different levels, and about politics, because he was a scientist and economist, and worked as a consultant in the administration of US presidents F. Roosevelt and H. Truman, and in the period after the publication of the novel "Atlas shrugged" — in the administration of J. Kennedy, L. Johnson. However, nothing is known about Ayn Rand's communication with him either. After the release of "Atlant", in 1973, J. K. Galbraith, in his book "Economic theories and the goals of society", wrote on the basis of his experience of several decades about how he sees it possible to overcome the conflict of interests described above in section 5 in the third and fourth comments to the figure that shows the relationship "The volume of supply of goods — price of sales": "... as the state is increasingly used in the interests of society, it becomes possible to consider those reforms that require state intervention.60 These reforms logically fall into three parts. First of all, there is a need to radically strengthen the influence and capability of the market system, positively increase its level of development in relation to the planning system, and thereby reduce the permanent inequality in the levels of development between the two systems on the part of the market system.61 This includes measures to reduce income inequality between the planning and market systems, to improve the competitive capabilities of the market system, and to reduce its exploitation by the planning system. We call this the “new socialism".62 Necessity has already brought about a new socialism on a much larger scale than most people suspect.
Then comes the policy for the planning system. It consists in ordering its goals so that they do not determine the interests of society, but serve them. This means limiting the use of resources in over-developed areas, switching the state to serve society rather than the planning system, protecting the environment, and switching technology to serve public rather than technocratic interests. These are the next steps that need to be considered in the reform strategy.
Finally, the economy needs to be controlled. The problem is to manage not one economy, but two: one is subordinate to the market, and the other is planned by the firms it comprises. Such controlling is the last step in determining the overall reform strategy."
And further, developing the topic, J. K. Galbraith continues:
"Old socialism allowed for ideology. There could be capitalism with its advantages and disadvantages; there could be state ownership of the means of production with its possibilities and limitations. There could be a choice between them. The choice depended on the opinions, on the ideas. It was therefore ideological. The new socialism does not allow for any acceptable alternatives; it can only be avoided at the cost of severe inconvenience, great social distress, and sometimes at the cost of fatal harm to health and well-being. The new socialism has no ideological character, it is imposed by circumstances. (…)
Only when socialism is seen as a necessary and in all respects normal characteristic of the system will this situation change. Then the society will demand high performance and will be proud of its actions. (…)
Circumstances are obviously not favorable to those who consider themselves defenders of the market economy, enemies of socialism. And because it is circumstances, not ideological preferences, that dictate the path, there is little that can be done about it."
In other words, the need for a "new socialism" is due to the problems that the liberal-market economy, even with elements of public administration, generates and is not able to solve them on the principles of implementing many private initiatives of entrepreneurs themselves, each of whom, according to Ayn Rand, knows best what to do and how to do it. And solving these problems, not creating new ones, according to Galbraith, can only be done by hierarchically higher- in relation to business activity - state administration in accordance with the principle expressed by Abraham Lincoln: "the legitimate role of government is to do for the community people everything that they need, but they themselves, speaking each in their individual capacities, cannot do or cannot do well." But this requires thoughtfulness and competence at the level of public administration.
However, to the end of her life, Ayn Rand was an opponent of public administration focused on the achievement of public welfare, which is steadily reproduced in the continuity of generations, in the sense that this concept was outlined at the beginning of this section. In the novel 'Atlas shrugged', John Galt proclaims essentially anarchism, but not a common, bourgeois-entrepreneurial one: "I saw a cancer of taxes that has been growing for centuries like gangrene, sucking the life juices out of us without any right, written or unwritten. I have seen the government stifle me with its edicts because I have succeeded, and help my competitors because they have been idle and failed... I have seen unions win all their lawsuits against me in gratitude for the fact that I provided for their existence. I have seen that it is considered quite legitimate to want unearned, undeserved money, but if a person wants to earn more, they are branded as a money-grubber. I've seen politicians wink at me and tell me not to worry — I just need to work a little harder, and I won't lose out."
Another speech against public administration:
"We can't leave at this time. We can neither leave nor run the country. What do we do, miss Taggart? (these are the words of one of the high-ranking state bureaucrats: our explanation when quoting).
— Start minimizing the controls.
— Excuse me?
— Start the abolition of taxes, loosen regulation.
— Oh, no, no, no! This is out of the question!
— Who is out of the question?
— I mean, now is not the time, miss Taggart. The country is not ready for this. I personally agree with you. I'm a freedom advocate, miss Taggart. I don't need power, but this is a special case."
And in the text of the novel there are many words about the harm of state taxes for private entrepreneurship, i.e. about the harm of the state, which can have only taxes and profits of public sector enterprises as sources of income, but the novel does not say a word about the usurious parasitism of the global transnational banking community.
However, there are aspects of life on which to challenge the correctness of Ayn Rand is stupid:
• It is certainly harmful to invest in the parasitism of social groups (this applies to the distribution of subsidies, a fair share of which is used to reproduce incompetence and parasitism in new generations).
• It is certainly harmful to invest in the inability to manage enterprises (this applies to the distribution of subsidies by industry and region).
• It is certainly harmful to use taxes to stifle socially necessary sectors of the economy and spheres of activity (this applies to tax policy).
However, contrary to the views of Ayn Rand, it is a combination of taxes, subsidies to consumers, and subsidies to producers that is managerial and appropriate to the goals of social development that is the only means of public financial management that allows solving the problems described in the comments to the figure "Volume of supply of goods — Sales price" in section 5. And in order to manage all this in the macroeconomic system of the state, you need to know what inter-industry balances of product exchange and solvency are and be able to interpret their components in a managerial way, since only balance models are based on the primary information of industries from the entire set of macroeconomic models: the input-output method.63
Therefore, a lot about the opportunities and the need for state macroeconomic controlling can be told to Ayn Rand by Vasily Leontief (1905 — 1999), a leading twentieth century leading developer of balance models and their application to solving problems of macroeconomic controlling in the conditions of capitalism.64 He, like Alice Rosenbaum, was born in St. Petersburg, and his mother, Zlata Benzionovna Becker, was an ethnic jew, so one would expect that Ayn Rand would not have a mutual dislike in dealing with him (as opposed to communicating with H. Ford). He could tell her a lot about intersectoral relationships and the problems of trans-sectoral public administration. But nothing is known about their communication either.
However, public administration cannot be limited to planning and regulating the state's economy and export-import flows. The life of society and its development should proceed in accordance with the objective laws of all six groups shown in the figure below. Their knowledge and controlling based on them — both state and business — are necessary to survive and develop civilization. If Ayn Rand in the form of an artistic narrative would describe the life of society and the activities of the state, proceeding on the basis of actual objective laws of all six groups, then her novel "People took up the improvement of the planet" would be priceless. This would be a landmark book for all states and peoples for several decades at least, because in this case it would open up possible ways to overcome the crisis of the current global civilization. But during 15 years of being clever in the course of writing the novel "Atlas shrugged", Ayn Rand did not come out to realize the fact of the biosphere-social (ecological) crisis, nor to realize the objective laws of all six groups. And the fact that the novel "Atlas shrugged" in the United States is one of the best sellers for many decades, does not speak in favor of the intellectual power and righteousness of the United States.
All of the above leads to the need to go back to the biography of Ayn Rand to see and understand her subjective reasons of such malicious and abundant graphomania.
"From the age of twenty-eight to the age of seventy something, Ayn Rand was, let's say, in a long-term relationship with dexedrin, a weight-loss drug. These weight-loss pills, which contain the powerful narcotic stimulant dextroamphetamine, were often shown on American television in commercials warning teenagers against drug use and describing the negative side effects of "uppers" (another name for amphetamines).65 According to some accounts, Rand took two small green pills daily for more than forty years, until finally her doctor advised her to give them up (…)
There were many followers around Rand, but none of them were as devoted to the writer as Nathan Blumenthal, a student from Canada who first became her protégé, then her intellectual heir, and then her personal sexual toy. They met in 1950, when nineteen-year-old Blumenthal sent Rand an enthusiastic fan letter. To his surprise, the famous writer invited him to her home so that he could participate in one of the endless philosophical discussion meetings that she called "Collectives".66 Blumenthal (soon he changed his name to Nathaniel Branden) managed to quickly enter the writer's inner circle. Rand even became a bridesmaid at his wedding. By 1955, their relationship had become physical. Rand was fifty by then, and Branden was twenty-five. In conversations with friends, she mentioned that she should have sex with him at least twice a week — to "remove the writer's clamp."
How did their spouses react to such a non-trivial relationship? Rand's husband, Frank O'Connor, didn't seem to mind. Branden's wife put up with the situation for several years (Rand was kind enough to inform the poor girl in advance of her plans to have an affair with her husband), but then filed for divorce. Branden used his access to the body of the founder of objectivism to establish the Nathaniel Branden Institute, a center dedicated to spreading Rand's egoistic "good news" around the world. However, in 1968, this idyll came to an end: Branden began secretly dating another follower of Rand, a young and beautiful model. After finding her partner unfaithful, Rand became enraged and vowed to destroy him. She gave a speech to the public in which she officially expelled Branden from the objectivist movement."67
So the history of the United States received as a "great social philosopher" a lustful woman, with an insatiable sense of self-importance and extensive vital untenable ambitions, "stimulated" by a drug that can cause paranoid delusions, mired in her own atheism and demonism and obsession derived from atheism.
In the photo on the left, a popular slogan in the United States: search these words in the Internet, and you will find many photos of walls and asphalt with it, as well as many offers to buy a t-shirt with this slogan.68
In other words, Ayn Rand's lifetime and, even more so, posthumous fame is the result of a purposefully organized violation of the principle: "Stop making bad people role models" on a global scale.6970
The reason for this life path of Ayn Rand is in her family, which failed to raise a person, but raised an ambitious egoist, hungry for sensual and psychological pleasures. Motivation of behavior by anticipation of pleasure is characteristic of fauna. A person is characterized by motivating behavior with righteous meanings, i.e., meanings that stem from conscience and love. However, Alice Rosenbaum for all her rather long life did not know love and did not understand its essence. In the novel 'Atlas shrugged', she wrote:
"Love is the recognition of values, the greatest reward for the moral qualities that you have achieved as a person, the emotional payment for the joy that a person receives from the virtues of another. Your moral code requires you to deprive love of its value content and give it to the first tramp you meet, requires you to love him not for his virtues, but for their absence, not as a reward, but out of mercy, such love is not a payment for virtue..." ("Atlas shrugged").
Love is not for something. Love happens from the bounty of the soul, but respect people for something specific that is peculiar to them; do not respect people, also for something specific that is peculiar to them. In society, sometimes, some people may respect or disrespect a person for one and the same, or even despise and hate him. It may also happen that some people are respected by the same people for something, and the same people do not respect other people for the same thing.
In the definition of "Love" given by Ayn Rand, in fact, she is talking about respect, due subjectively to a particular morality and worldview. True Love has its foundation and purpose in itself. And that is why people love despite the fact that there is nothing to respect. But love in this case does not amuse the complacency of someone who has nothing to respect for, and in one way or another, sometimes very cruelly, encourages someone who has nothing to respect for, who is quite worthy of contempt and hatred, so that he develops personally and becomes a conscientious person. Love is a free and generous gift, not a trophy of war obtained after the storming and looting of a fortress, or alms that were managed to be begged.
Conclusion
In general, anyone who wants to be a successful entrepreneur or at least wants to avoid being an idiot in life, do not waste time reading the works of Ayn Rand: you will have to wade through her boredom and stupidity for a long time. If you really want to understand the life of society, then be attentive to what is happening and think for yourself, and first of all try to read books written by people who really took place as high versatile professionals of their era:
• M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (a graduate of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, the highest post in the civil service is vice-governor). "Pompadours and pompadouresses".
• P. F. Lesgaft (teacher, doctor). "Family education of the child and its significance" (and especially the Chapter "School types").
• A. N. Krylov (shipbuilder, mathematician, academician, chairman of the Marine technical committee). "Memoirs and essays".
• H. Ford. "My life and work" and "Today and tomorrow".
• V. Y. Khripach et al. "Enterprise Economics" (one of the most clear and thematically complete manuals for self-education on the problems of enterprise management in a more or less stable functioning of the market, although the problems of the macroeconomic level are not considered in it).
• L. Erhard (Minister of economy of Germany in 1948 — 1963, from 1963 to 1966 — Chancellor of Germany, organizer of the "German economic miracle"). "Welfare for all".
• J. K. Galbraith. "Economic theories and goals of society", "Economics of innocent deception: the truth of our time".71
• J. Stalin. "Economic problems of socialism in the USSR".
• I. A. Efremov (an outstanding paleontologist and geologist, who really became as a social philosopher). "Razor's edge", "Andromeda Nebula", "The Bull's Hour".
But reading these books requires the work of thought and feelings, in contrast to reading "Atlant" in the mode of inability to think by processes, i.e. with consideration of the flow of Alice's speech.
And then think about life and social controlling in accordance with all six groups of objective laws that govern the lives of people, social groups, culturally peculiar societies, and humanity as a whole. And after that, you will have to master your creative potential, because the textbooks of the scientific and educational officialdom of all countries do not say anything about all this… In short:72
Russia and the whole world need bolsheviks-entrepreneurs, politicians, scientists, teachers, workers and bearers of all other professions: a bolshevik is someone who selflessly works for the development of people, culturally peculiar societies, humanity as a whole, and therefore God helps the bolsheviks, even if the crowd and the "elite" do not appreciate them or their work.
Internal Predictor of the USSR
July 19 — August 1 2018