A NJ Letter-Writer’s Comic Book Economics

A lot of dumb letters appear in my New Jersey Star-Ledger. I usually ignore them. But every so often one appears that, though dumb, touches on something important that deserves attention. The following letter is one such letter, because the view presented is destructive yet widely believed, including by prominent people who should, and perhaps do, know better. A letter titled What billionaires do is count their profits appeared in the Star-Ledger on April 8, 2022. Written in rebuttal to the letter In defense of billionaire job creators by Bruce Papkin, Charlie Hagel opines

Jobs are created by consumer demand for goods and services, to which profit-seeking companies respond. Can we finally put an end to this canard that billionaires create jobs — although they do profit from creation of jobs?

 

This implies that profit-seeking companies spring up like weeds on the whims of consumers. These companies have no cause whatsoever. They magically spring up like weeds out of sidewalk cracks, followed by jobs that magically appear for workers to fill, whose individual work is magically coordinated to result in goods and services that fill the “demands” of consumers—all without any intelligent design or direction whatsoever. Somehow, would-be billionaires appear, apparently out of nowhere, to somehow mindlessly profit from the magically “created” jobs—created, how?—until their profits add up to 10 figures! 

This view is a denial of brains. It holds that there is no vision, risk assessment, thinking, planning, decision-making, prioritizing, or intelligence behind the production of consumer goods and services. Yet, that intelligent design is precisely what capitalists/businessmen/entrepreneurs provide. The idea that consumers’ mere desires, rather than innovation, drive production is a toddler’s view of economics. Toddlers want, and their desires are provided. Like the toddler, Hagel has no clue how those desires are met. To Hagel’s worldview, like the toddler’s, stuff consumers “demand”—which they somehow know about before they’re created—just appears out of nowhere—or out of magical job-filled companies.

The idea that goods and services originate with consumer demand is comical. Rather, they originate in the innovative minds of entrepreneurs, who then take the steps necessary to bring their product ideas into being. They create the companies, secure and allocate the capital, assess the employment needs, judge the skills, and hire the employees needed to complete the production and offer it to the consumer market, among many other decisions and actions. Hagel is wrong. Consumers are not responsible for the product or the related jobs created. They are the beneficiaries. The businessman created the product and the jobs. 

Consumers, in fact, rarely know what they want until they see it. Inventors conceive. Capitalists/businessmen/entrepreneurs decide how much consumer demand, if any, there may be for the invention—and then figure out how to manufacture the invention at scale. Often, they are the same people. Often, the risk doesn’t pay off. But when it does, and when the new consumer market for the new product or service amounts into the millions, the businessman gets rich. And in the most successful cases, a billionaire results. It is the now-rich Capitalists/businessmen/entrepreneurs who created and are responsible for the products and the jobs, not the consumer, who is the end, not the beginning, of the productive process.

At this point I’ll concretize this process to demonstrate my point by recounting a personal real-life experience. I often watch CNBC, the financial market channel. Usually, it’s on as sort of “background noise”, since not everything covered particularly interests me. Often, they have interviews with prominent market individuals. In 2019, I was watching when they brought on Ben Silbermann, a founder of a company that had just gone public. The public offering made Silberman, and his co-founder Evan Sharp, billionaires on paper. I’m mildly interested in this type of interview, because I love entrepreneurialism. But my ears really perked up when the name of the company was mentioned, Pinterest. Why perk up? Because I’d been hearing that name mentioned in my household regularly. You see, my wife is an active subscriber to Pinterest, visiting almost every day. As it turns out, she was one of 250 million—yes, million—such subscribers at the time of the public offering. (The company’s active monthly subscriber list has since grown to over 400 million.) 

Now, I asked my wife about what she thought of Pinterest in 2010, the year the company was launched. According to Hagel’s “consumer demand” theory of jobs, there should have been massive demand for Pinterest in 2010. Of course, my wife had never heard of Pinterest in 2010. Pinterest came first, thanks to Silberman and Sharp. It was the product that generated the consumer demand. Hagel has it backwards.

Of course, the founders had no idea how much demand there would be, either. That’s the risk entrepreneurs take. And that’s the point Hagel’s simplistic worldview misses. Capitalist business entrepreneurs become billionaires because they create new goods that consumers didn’t know they wanted, if they wanted it, until they are offered to the marketplace. And, of course, a simple idea, though a vital starting point, is not enough. The entrepreneur then must start and build a company that can figure out how to make the innovative product not only of interest to consumers, but also at a price that consumers are willing and able to pay, yet still high enough to exceed the cost of production so the company can earn a profit. This takes the vision, brains, and actions that the special people who become billionaires provide. It is not consumers who provide it. The myriad products in the market don’t originate with consumers. Goods and services, and the myriad incremental improvements that follow, originate as an idea in the minds of extraordinary innovative individuals. So, too, the related jobs that businesses create to help advance the productive process that results in the products reaching the consumers. The consumer is the last, not the first, step in the productive, job-creating process.

True, the job needs of the established company are subsequently influenced by consumer demand, once the product and company have been created. And true, the original capitalist/businessman/entrepreneur can “count his billions” as the value of the company grows. But, good for him or her. She earned it. Keep in mind that someone still has to do the thinking, planning, and crucial decision-making that keeps the established profit-seeking company going and growing. That’s the indispensable job of the capitalist/businessman/entrepreneur. 

Many creators, of course, go on to new ventures, relinquishing management controls to others. But if the company continues to prosper after the original creator moves on, then that’s thanks to the ability of that original creator—the Prime Mover—to pick competent successors. Apple’s continued success following the death of Steve Jobs is thanks to Job’s ability to pick a great successor, Tim Cook. Billionaires profit from the goods and services they create. Jobs are a secondary social benefit.

But if the now wealthy original creator wants to keep his shares sit back, kick up his heels, and count his riches as the company stock rises, the original creator should still be lauded for his hugely socially beneficial productive achievement[s]. It should always be kept in mind that the company and jobs owe their existence to the original Prime Mover—the Ben Silbermans and Steve Jobs of the world—not to “consumer demand.” . 

Hagel’s worldview is a 2 year-old’s worldview. It is comic book economics, divorced from reality, probably an offshoot of Karl Marx’s absurd “exploitation theory” of labor. Hagel’s view ignores the role of intelligence, and individual minds, in the creation of profit-seeking companies and the jobs that result. Perhaps Hagel can be partially excused, given that prominent politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders peddle these destructive myths to further their own scandalous socialist political purposes. But only partially excused. Ignorance of this magnitude is never innocent, given the deep injustice implied.

Related Reading:

Quora: ‘Is capitalism based on the exploitation of others?’

The Prime Movers by Edwin Locke

The Moral Injustice of the Assault on the Space Billionaires

QUORA: 'How is becoming a billionaire even possible, chronologically?'

QUORA: ‘What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour which produces surplus value?'

Marx and His Exploitation Theory BY GEORGE REISMAN 

Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand

To Whom Does the American Worker Owe His Prowess?

A Few Passing Thoughts on Objectivism

A few years ago, Anoop Verma shared an article on Facebook from his Verma Report titled Is Ayn Rand’s Objectivism a Philosophy? The article is no longer available. But Verma’s preamble indicates hostility toward Objectivism:

My honest view of Ayn Rand's objectivism:

"There is more than one excuse for being an Ayn Rand, but there is no excuse whatsoever for being an objectivist."

I posted this comment:

Rand is to philosophy what Pavarotti is to opera. Pavarotti brought opera out of the highbrow world of the Italian elites to the enjoyment of the popular “masses”. Rand brought philosophy out of the Ivory Tower and made it a practical life guide for the average person. 

I’ll leave it to “philosophers” to debate how many angels (or straw men) can dance on the head of a pin. Objectivism has given me valuable insights and principles, in clear and understandable terms, that has helped me navigate life and make sense of the world. As a practical philosophy, Objectivism is invaluable.

A comment thread ensued, which is available here. Following are two replies of mine responding to others’ comments. 

I'm with you, Rich. Any belief system, whether or not it fits some technical definition of a philosophy, can be treated as a dogma. I have found that Objectivism, when applied diligently, works against dogmatism. But you always have to be on guard against the temptation of dogmatism, even with Objectivism. 

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Philosophically, rationalism is a belief in innate knowledge divorced from observation or experience. Peikoff has a book, “Objective Communication,” that has a whole chapter on rationalism. The Objectivist position holds that “Knowledge is . . . the integration of logic and experience, not an either-or situation.” 

Sean, I’m not sure what you mean by “the Peikoff brigade” a while back. He used the analogy of the spiral, with the top of the spiral being abstraction, and the bottom representing concrete reality. The point is to keep one’s abstractions grounded in reality, even as one draws out the abstract principles involved. I found it quite helpful. 

Related Reading:

Pavarotti and Rand

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff 

Greta Thunberg's Hatred of Man

Climate catastrophist Greta Thunberg has used this year’s Earth Day to lament that there has never been a  “happy Earth Day.” MarketWatch covered her pronouncements in Reality check from Greta Thunberg: It has never been a ‘happy Earth Day’. After the obligatory “scientists say” and “climate crisis” Chicken Little scare buzzwords, the article states:

But many teenagers like 19-year-old Thunberg and others in their 20s — who will inherit the warming planet and its entrenched systemic problems — say politicians and members of older generations aren’t doing nearly enough to protect them from the ongoing climate crisis.

In a report released in September that surveyed 10,000 young people in 10 countries, almost six in 10 respondents said they were very or extremely worried about climate change, and nearly half said their climate anxiety impacted their daily life and functioning. Four in 10 said they were hesitant to have kids of their own.

My emphasis.

Since 1970, world poverty has plunged, far fewer people die from extreme weather, more than half the world has reached middle class status. Life in general is longer, cleaner, healthier, safer, and more prosperous than ever before. In short, human life and the planet has gotten steadily better since Earth Day 1 in 1970.  

And yet Greta Thunberg finds nothing to celebrate on this or any Earth Day. Why?

The "climate anxiety" being inflicted on young people by the climate catastrophists is educational malpractice, if not outright child abuse. Young people, in fact, have never faced a brighter future. Let's hope Thunberg never gets her "happy Earth Day". It would be catastrophic for human life, especially for young people. 

Greta is a hateful, ungrateful teenage sociopath. Her elders have bequeathed to young people a planet transformed from hostile to conducive to human flourishing. Yet she peddles unrelenting pessimism—she calls this vast improvement destruction. She may love the planet, but not man. She rants that “Earth Day has turned into an opportunity for people in power to profess their ‘love’ for the planet while at the same time destroying it at maximum speed.” This, from the avowed enemy of economic growth—the growth needed for young people to build good lives. Her idea that man is destroying the planet by making it an immensely better environment for human life and flourishing is the voice of the Dark Ages. A more honest alternate title for an article reporting on Thunberg’s pessimistic rant would be, Greta Thunberg's Hatred of Man.

Related Reading:

After 53 Earth Days, Society Still Hasn't Collapsed -- “The Limits to Growth is still ‘as wrongheaded as it is possible to be.’” by Ronald Bailey for Reason

The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old

The Great Enrichment by Deirdre McCloskey

Fossil Fuels and Climate Change: Remember Life Before Them

Our Alleged 'Climate Crisis' is No Longer, Thanks to Fossil Fuels

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress—Steven Pinker

Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know by Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy 

QUORA : ‘Capitalism only works when it rewards the winners and punishes the losers. What should a modern society do with the losers?’

 QUORA : ‘Capitalism only works when it rewards the winners and punishes the losers. What should a modern society do with the losers?’

I posted this answer:

Capitalism, economically, doesn’t “reward” or “punish” anybody. It is not a top-down, centrally planned social system. Just the opposite. Economically, capitalism protects the freedom to produce and trade, and to keep whatever you earn in the process. To earn is to provide an economic value that others are willing to pay you for at a payment to you that is more than the cost you incur to produce it. There is no guarantee of success, or if you are successful that you will continue to succeed. 

Since production is not a “zero sum game,” and trade is by definition a win-win transaction, economic activity under capitalism is not about winners and losers, in the zero-sum sense.  It is about success, and the level of each individual’s success (or rewards) is determined by the degree to which he satisfies consumer desires. Since society is made up of individuals, the only thing “society”--other individuals--can do for those who fail to succeed is to help them out voluntarily, but otherwise leave them free to learn from their failures, pick themselves up, and try again. 

“Society”—as represented by the government—should do nothing directly for the less- or non- successful, in the sense of forced redistribution and/or special political favors (cronyism). The best thing the government can do is to maintain a fully free economy. The beauty of Capitalistic free markets is that the successful provide an unending stream of opportunities for those who fail in some venture, yet have the drive to try again. Of course, living in a free economy, where there are no government-imposed impediments to success, such as occupational licensing or NIMBY zoning restrictions, the motivated individual does not have to count only on opportunities provided by others. Through innovation and entrepreneurial energy, each person is free to create his/her own opportunities. Of course, not everyone can be a top wealth creator. But each can learn from these Prime Movers and apply the lessons according to his/her own levels of ability, motivation, and interests.

Capitalism works because it not only fosters success and achievement, but maintains the individual freedom for all but the tiny minority who have lost the physical/mental ability to take care of themselves to avoid becoming the “loser” who has to depend on modern society to “do something” with them.

Related Reading:

QUORA: ‘Why do you agree or disagree that Capitalism has been responsible for dramatically improving the working class’ standard of living?’

QUORA: ‘How is capitalism NOT a zero-sum game?’

QUORA: ‘Is capitalism voluntary?’

The Capitalist Manifesto by Andrew Bernstein  

QUORA *: 'How is capitalism good despite the fact that it creates higher and lower classes?'

QUORA: '[W]hy do we ignore all the examples of capitalism failing, like the major divide between the wealthy and the poor in the US?'

QUORA: ‘Given that I live in a capitalist society, how can I avoid having my labor exploited?’

QUORA *: 'How is capitalism good despite the fact that it creates higher and lower classes?'

QUORA: '[W]hy do we ignore all the examples of capitalism failing, like the major divide between the wealthy and the poor in the US?'

QUORA: ‘Given that I live in a capitalist society, how can I avoid having my labor exploited?’

How the 1619 Project is a Pro-Slavery Document

I have argued that the New York Times’ 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones was a devious attempt to undermine and obliterate Americanism by reconceiving America’s Founding as a 1619 slave state rather than the free nation that was intended in 1776. In 2021 I wrote a post titled The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery. In that post, I wrote of that project:

But maybe that’s the point. If, as the line of thinking expressed [in a WAPO column] by [Joe] Heim and the NYT [1619 Project] goes, slavery is key to prosperity, then slavery must be good. The only question then becomes, how to implement slavery equally and “fairly”. To repeat the question, why the reactionary urge to elevate slavery over freedom as the defining characteristic of America? After all, if freedom is good, why not fight to spread freedom to every individual, leaving no one out, as urged by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King, and Harvey Milk? The answer is simple. It’s the freedom, not the slavery, that the reactionaries want to evict.  The rise of socialism in 21st Century America can not proceed on the basis of American ideals rooted in individual rights. In the same way and for the same reason that the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution are anti-slavery documents, they are also anti-socialist documents. Socialism holds that the individual belongs to the state, as the slave belongs to his master. The Declaration holds that the individual’s life is his and hers alone. So the collectivists of the Left have to ignore those ideals; or more precisely obliterate them as if they never existed. Why? in order to bring about the most broad-based form of master-slave system--a socialist America. You can’t radically transform a capitalist nation into a socialist nation without obliterating capitalism’s foundation. That foundation is the same philosophical foundation of America’s Founding--the inalienable liberty rights of the individual, all individuals, equally and at all times. It’s not equality per se the socialists oppose. It’s equality of individual freedom they oppose--to be replaced with equality of slavery--universal slavery, except for the ruling elites, the sociopaths who are to be more equal than the rest.

Hannah-Jones has now come out with a new book doubling down on her original theme The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Phillip W. Magness has a great review and commentary on that new book for Reason, The 1619 Project Unrepentantly Pushes Junk History. I want to cite one portion of Magness’s essay that seems to confirm my proposition. All italics are mine:

 

On the surface, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World) expands the short essays from The New York Times print edition into almost 600 pages of text, augmented by additional chapters and authors. The unmistakable subtext is an opportunity to answer the barrage of controversies that surrounded the project after its publication in August 2019. "We wanted to learn from the discussions that surfaced after the project's publication and address the criticisms some historians offered in good faith," Hannah-Jones announces in the book's introduction, before devoting the majority of her ink to denouncing the blusterous critical pronouncements of the Trump administration after it targeted The 1619 Project in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Serious scholarly interlocutors of the original project are largely sidestepped, and factual errors in the original text are either glossed over or quietly removed.

While the majority of the public discussion around The 1619 Project has focused on Hannah-Jones' lead essay, its greatest defects appear in the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond's essay on "Capitalism." Hannah-Jones' writings provide the framing for the project, but Desmond supplies its ideological core—a political charge to radically reorient the basic structure of the American economy so as to root out an alleged slavery-infused brutality from capitalism.

Hannah-Jones' prescriptive call for slavery reparations flows seamlessly from Desmond's argument, as does her own expanded historical narrative—most recently displayed in a lecture series for MasterClass in which she attempted to explain the causes of the 2008 financial crisis by faulting slavery. "The tendrils of [slavery] can still be seen in modern capitalism," she declared, where banking companies "were repackaging risky bonds and risky notes…in ways [that] none of us really understood." The causal mechanism connecting the two events remained imprecise, save for allusions to "risky slave bonds" and a redesignation of the cotton industry as "too big to fail."

Making what appears to be a muddled reference to the Panic of 1837, she confidently declared that "what happened in 1830 is what happened in 2008." The claimed connection aimed to prove that the "American capitalist system is defined today by the long legacy and shadow of slavery." This racist, brutal system "offers the least protections for workers of all races," she said, and it thus warrants a sweeping overhaul through the political instruments of the state. To this end, Hannah-Jones appends an expanded essay to The 1619 Project book, endorsing a Duke University study's call for a "vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies."

"At the center of those policies," she declared, "must be reparations."

If Capitalism "offers the least protections for workers,” then what social system would logically offer the “best” protections? The obvious answer would have to be Capitalism’s opposite, socialism. Well, the Confederate intelligentsia made the exact same argument against Capitalism, defending slavery as “the very best form of socialism.” Matthew Desmond and Confederate slaveholders agree—slavery offers the best protections for workers of all races.

Of course, the best protection for workers is articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the universal equality of inalienable individual rights promised in America’s true Founding. Capitalism, the logical outgrowth of those Foundiung principles, inherited slavery—and then, in the face of thousands of years in which slavery was accepted as normal, abolished it. The Declaration of 1776 is the genesis of modern Capitalism. It is also the ultimate anti-slave philosophy. 

Enter the 1619 Project. The Enlightenment principles summarized in the Declaration of Independence are as much anti-socialist as anti-slavery. And that points to, in my view, the root purpose of the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project is a creation by and for socialists—and reactionaries against America, Capitalism, and individual freedom. 

Socialism runs contrary to America's Founding principles of individualism. Socialism is the political manifestation of collectivism. A socialist America can’t be built upon a foundation of individualism. So America's Founding principles must be abandoned. But those principles can't be refuted honestly and intellectually. But they are too powerful to be openly challenged, let alone defeated. So, America’s individualist Founding must be discredited and ultimately obliterated as if they never existed. 

That is why the socialists need "A New Origin Story" of America—an origin that cuts out the 155 years between 1619 and 1776, a period that includes The Enlightenment and its thinkers that generated the true Foundational principles that led to the Founding of the United States of America, and that spawned the death warrant for all manner of tyranny of men over men, including slavery. Magness’s analysis strongly implies that this project is really an attempt to demolish Capitalism and Americanism and pave the road to the ultimate slave plantation, a socialist America. Hannah-Jones’s claim that reparations are “At the center of those policies'' is a smokescreen. A mere policy of reparations simply does not explain the need for the “vast social transformation . . . through the political instruments of the state. 

Enter The New Origin Story.

The 1776 Founding of the United States of America emerged out of ideas that gripped the British colonies in the middle of the 18th Century, and which grew out of the Enlightenment of the late 17th/early 18th centuries. This revolutionary philosophical earthquake has been well-documented by scholars, including Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and C. Bradley Thompson. By seeking a revision of history that airbrushes out the meaning and true ideological origins of 1776 and the anti-slavery political/social system that it spawned, Hannah-Jones, the New York Times, Matthew Desmond, and their ilk would pave the way for the collectivist/statist ideology that socialism, and thus universal slavery, depends upon. So let me reiterate this bold claim: The 1619 Project is really a reactionary pro-slavery document, which ultimate aim is to obliterate not just Capitalism but Americanism more broadly, and replace it with a new slave system, which would feature a new Master in place of the plantation owner, the state. The name of this system is Socialism.

Related Reading:

Biden Cancels America

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson.

The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism

The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery

Did Ayn Rand Call for a Deliberate ‘Destruction of Society’ in Atlas Shrugged?

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS. ANYONE WHO HAS NOT READ ATLAS SHRUGGED BUT THINKS THEY MAY SOME DAY SHOULD TAKE NOTE.

This post deals with a question that I think is somewhat controversial. A while back I came across this hit piece against Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on Facebook, since deleted:

Only the philosophers whose entire learning comes from books can be naive and arrogant enough to believe that all the political and cultural institutions have to be destroyed before a better society can be built. But once the institutions are destroyed  there will be chaos and massive violence. I admire Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged but I am against John Galt’s idea of “stopping the motor of the world”, because I know that once the motor is stopped millions of lives will be lost and the rebuilding of society will take several generations.

I think the writer—who will go unnamed—is completely misreading the meaning of Atlas Shrugged. As Ayn Rand explicitly explained, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is “the role of the mind in human existence.” She considered the human mind and those who use it to address the challenges of human existence to be “the motor of the world.”  She referred to the thinkers as “the men of the mind.” And the leading, most talented, most motivated, most productive  men of the mind she called the “prime movers.” It is the prime movers, the pinnacle of all who think and thus the most highly productive, who mostly go on strike, initially. The strike eventually spreads, with workers leaving their jobs in droves even though they have not officially joined Galt’s strikers.

The strike is not intended to be taken as a literal call for “a strike of the men of the mind.” In fact, of Atlas Shrugged, she wrote in her journals, “I start with the fantastic premise of the prime movers going on strike.” The italics are hers. Rand herself described Galt’s strike as “a fantastic premise.” Mirriam -Webster defines fantastic as “based on fantasy” and “so extreme as to challenge belief.” Rand goes on:

This is the actual heart and center of the novel. A distinction carefully to be observed here: I do not set out to glorify the prime mover (that was The Fountainhead). I set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers, and how viciously it treats them. And I show it on a hypothetical case—what happens to the world without them. [again, italics are hers.]

The strike is “a hypothetical case.” She herself did not call for any kind of organized strike, or even believe it possible. (She did, however, call on America’s businessmen to fight back, first and foremost by not sanctioning their exploiters and destroyers.) The strike is intended to dramatize, in fiction form, what happens when the human mind is not free to function. It may be “naive and arrogant” to think such a literal organized strike is realistic or desirable. But I don’t see anything “naive and arrogant” about the message. I take Atlas Shrugged to be a warning, not in any way a cruel call to destroy society in order to rebuild it. In Atlas Shrugged, society is already on its way to destruction. “John Galt’s idea of ‘stopping the motor of the world’” is misleading, I think. The motor of the world is already grinding to a halt. Galt’s mission is to rescue as many victims of the altruist/collectivist assault as he can.

This is important. The strike is a work of fiction. It could never happen in real life, in that way. In real life, an increasingly dictatorial government makes it progressively harder for people to act on their own judgment. At some point, the government’s controls reach a tipping point and the economy and society collapse into poverty, brutality, and tyranny, as every fully socialist country has demonstrated. In Atlas Shrugged, the U.S. is deteriorating toward the inevitable “tipping point.” Galt’s strike accelerates the deterioration, but does not change the inevitable collapse. 

But again, this is a work of fiction intended to dramatize the results of what happens when the motor of the world, the human mind, can no longer freely function. 

Yes, in Atlas Shrugged, the collapse is being given a deliberate push. But that is the mystery part of the story. The fact that “chaos and massive violence” will ensue and “millions of lives will be lost and the rebuilding of society will take several generations” is not the fault of the strikers or of John Galt and his allies. In the novel, it is already happening all over the world and America is next if the villains aren’t driven from power. Galt’s strikers are victims too, destined for destruction, except that they learn that it is not good to sanction their own destroyers--what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victims”--and thus meekly accept inevitable destruction. The strikers are heroes fighting evil by not sanctioning and thus helping evil to triumph. They are not villains who want to destroy society. They are heroes who want to save it. In reality, Ayn Rand spent more than two decades after Atlas Shrugged on non-fiction writing and lecturing on how people, especially businessmen, can fight back rather than quit.

Of course, if any particular prime mover -- a businessman, investor, inventor, entrepreneur, scientist chooses to stop working and retire, or simply leave that society rather than deal with draconian taxes and regulation, it is her moral right. There is a limit to how much a productive individual will tolerate exploitation. 

And, in fact, producers have been silently “going on strike” against altruistic/collectivistic societies throughout history. The Dark ages was a massive “strike” of intelligence. In Britain’s flirtation with full-blown socialism in the 1960s, this phenomenon of talented people giving up and/or leaving came to be called a “brain drain”. The same goes for any productive individual on any level of ability. A prime contemporary example -- no pun intended -- is Venezuela, which began descending into hell when Hugo Chavez and his socialist thugs were voted into office about a quarter century ago. As AP reports:

It’s a frequent scene across the U.S.-Mexico border at a time of swelling migration. But these aren’t farmers and low-wage workers from Mexico or Central America, who make up the bulk of those crossing. They’re bankers, doctors and engineers from Venezuela, and they’re arriving in record numbers as they flee turmoil in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves and pandemic-induced pain across South America. 

Hunger, poverty, and unnecessary deaths have spread across Venezuela. Are these bankers, doctors, and engineers the villains -- the cause of Venezuelans’ misery? Or is it the socialist regime and the majority that voted them into power?  

AP goes on to say “The surprise increase has drawn comparisons to the midcentury influx of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist rule.” These are examples of Atlas Shrugging in real life.

I think the writer is all wet. Rand never advocated nor desired the destruction of society. Her whole life in America was a crusade to save it. She did not believe that “all the political and cultural institutions have to be destroyed before a better society can be built.” She advocated standing and fighting. “So long as there isn’t censorship,” Rand said in answer to a question, “one doesn’t have to leave society the way the characters did in Atlas Shrugged.” The quote at the start of this post is a classic example of blaming the victims, not the villains.

Related reading:

Ayn Rand: Tea Party Voice of the Founding Fathers

Golden Anniversary of an Inspiration

Why is a "Liberal" Promoting Atlas Shrugged?

Is Atlas Shrugging?

Atlas Shrugged; Heros or Villains?

Paul Hsieh's Tribute to Steve Jobs