Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [118]
When Dagny and Rearden return to New York, collectivist Washington is busy wresting the John Galt Line from Dagny by means of an “Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog” directive that prohibits “vicious competition” among railroads; the profitable line gives Dagny too much independent power. Once the line is closed, all that’s left in the region is an old, broken-down railroad, and it stops running. Without transport, the new industries founder. Their leaders, too, begin to disappear. That’s when Dagny decides to pursue the mystery of the vanishing titans, find the inventor of the motor, and discover why “the motor of the world” is poised to stop.
In the midst of unrelenting action, Atlas Shrugged is also an eleven-hundred-page deconstruction of the Marxian proposition “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” The failure of the transportation system, the collectivization of industries, and the resulting economic atavism all broadly reproduce the Russian transition period under Lenin from a primitive capitalism to a brutal Communism in which human energy, far from being a creative force, was no more than “a raw commodity which the state could use to ‘build socialism,’” wrote Orlando Figes. The novel is full of detailed parallels with the Russia of Rand’s youth, including the Communists’ failed attempts to force deposed capitalists to run their old businesses for the benefit of the state. It is surely also the only page-turning critique ever written of the Rooseveltian welfare state, the bureaucratization of the altruistic impulse, and the transformation of America from a culture of self-reliance to one of entitlement.
Midway through the novel, Dagny meets an old hobo who tells her a parable that deftly encapsulates this theme. Dagny is on a Taggart train, rushing west to find a talented young scientist before he, too, disappears—only to be stranded in the Kansas prairie when the train’s crew bolts in the night, in defiance of a new law forbidding any worker to leave his job. The hobo is dressed in rags not because he doesn’t want to work, he assures Dagny. For twenty years, he held a job as a skilled lathe operator at the very same Twentieth Century Motor Company where Dagny found the prototype motor. Dagny is startled but says, “Go on.” About twelve years earlier, he says, Jed Starnes, the founder of the company, died, leaving the business to his three rich, idle children. The Starnes heirs had noble ideals, or so they announced to an assembly of the company’s six thousand employees when they took over. “We’re all one big family,” they said. On a mass vote, the employees adopted the Starneses’ progressive plan, in which work would be assigned according to ability and rewards would be doled out based not on merit but on need. Within a year, previously productive employees suddenly developed incapacitating needs—they had crippling accidents, became alcoholics, gave birth to broods of hungry children. As the needy segment grew, the active workforce shrank, quality dropped off, and customers went elsewhere. The industrious ones who did their jobs were expected to work long hours for less money. Usually, they either hid their ability or quit. Workers spied on one another to make sure that no one was working more slowly or less effectively than they and destroyed equipment out of laziness or malice. Within four years, the company was bankrupt. One man had foreseen the evil of this system from the start—a tall, copper-haired engineer who kept to himself and was known only by name. After the vote, he