I said earlier this month that I would, from time to time, highlight some of my favorite passages from Atlas Shrugged. October 10 will be the 65th anniversary of its publication.
One commenter, Paul Sand, recommended Francisco d’Anconia’s speech on money. It’s one of my favorites also. I like it, not just because of its ideas but also because of something Ayn Rand does very well that she gets very little credit for: fresh phrasing. George Orwell talked about how when you use too many shopworn phrases, they replace thinking. Rand had an ability to come up with fresh ways of saying things.
Some highlights within the speech follow.
What I think of whenever I think about inheritance taxes:
Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune.
Her great wording:
Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect?
That last line is so good. My guess is that Ayn Rand never saw a baseball game in her life. But what a fresh metaphor.
Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.
I love the wording but I strongly disagree with Rand’s view that someone like that doesn’t deserve to live.
On making money:
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’
READER COMMENTS
Art Carden
Sep 20 2022 at 9:10am
I love the last part about *making* money. It blows my mind every time I teach specialization and show that trading gives people more output with the same inputs, just arranged differently.
I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s quote about there being no more innocent employment than *getting* money. I wish he’d said “making,” because there’s another passage in Atlas describing one of the villains as having had no interest in making money, only in getting it.
BC
Sep 20 2022 at 11:48am
That’s a good point about inheritance taxes that I hadn’t thought of before. An inheritance tax is equivalent to a mandate that a person leave some portion of his estate to complete strangers, to be chosen by politicians. I’ve never heard an inheritance tax proponent explain what those complete strangers have done for the deceased to merit such an inheritance nor what those politicians, who also typically are complete strangers to the deceased, have done to earn the deceased’s trust and Power of Attorney.
Paul Sand
Sep 20 2022 at 1:52pm
Thanks for the cite, David.
Why I mentioned it: Back in 2014, my then-employer, the University of New Hampshire, offered a summer program for “Ambitious High-School Students”. Their week-long topic: “Money, Greed, and Corruption”. Their promotional web page is no longer available, but it (somewhat sneeringly) quoted four words from the last paragraph of Francisco’s speech:
… and it got worse from there. Anyway, it inspired a blog post that I still kind of like. (Unfortunately a number of links there no longer work.)
I offered to give a dramatic reading of Francisco’s speech to the “Ambitious High School Students”, but didn’t hear back.
Henri Hein
Sep 20 2022 at 2:58pm
I was intrigued by your reference to corruption by IMF chief Christine Lagarde. Is this the story you had in mind? (The link in the blog post is one of the broken ones).
Paul Sand
Sep 20 2022 at 4:04pm
I think that’s right. My post is from 2014, and your link refers to the very long-running investigation that was generating some publicity then. It now appears that she was eventually convicted of negligence, but went unpunished.
MarkW
Sep 20 2022 at 4:46pm
<em>By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy.</em>
This is the kind of Randian writing that puts me off. Fools (and those with some foolish desires) are worthy of consideration. There is no shame in selling them what they’d like to buy. And obviously foolishness is subjective. The is an almost unlimited number of things that people spend their hard-earned money on which seem <a href=”https://www.sideshow.com/brands/star-wars”>silly</a>or <a href=”https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Ayn+Rand&fe=on&pics=on&sortby=1&tn=Atlas+Shrugged”>foolish</a> to me. As for ‘getting more than your ability deserves’ — what economic nonsense! Your ability doesn’t ‘deserve’ any particular remuneration (she’s flirting with the socialist labor-theory of value!). It depends on the messiness of ever shifting supply and demand.
The vast majority of people earn their living doing ordinary things that Rand would not respect, and yet their efforts are essential (most of the things people want to spend their money on are pretty mundane too). Randian Übermensch heros are extremely scarce on the ground in the real world. They’re not irrelevant, of course, but they are also not what makes the world work. I’ll take the quotidian distributed cooperation of “I, Pencil” over the hero worship of “Atlas Shrugged” every day of the week.
David Henderson
Sep 20 2022 at 7:43pm
Basically I agree with most of your critique, especially the part about fools. And notice that I didn’t highlight any of that.
robc
Sep 21 2022 at 10:14am
I agree with you on the Fools portion, but your last paragraph is wrong. Rand considered the people doing ordinary things heroes too, if they did them well, and were using the best of their abilities.
Reardon’s secretary is one example from the book.
David Henderson
Sep 21 2022 at 11:49am
Good point. I read MarkW’s critique too quickly.
AtlasShrugged69
Sep 23 2022 at 10:42am
Keep in mind this is D’Anconia talking, which is =/= Rand herself. I’ve noticed her novels’ heroes tend to be 90% virtuous and 10% flawed in some way. This portion on ‘fools’ is certainly hyperbole, but I don’t think Rand would look down on anyone involved in “I, Pencil” (or even those manufacturing overpriced Star Wars likenesses). A better example might be: Imagine I develop an app where one can fling dirty diapers at a cartoon version of Joe Biden. It takes off and I become a millionaire. Contrast that to starting a successful restaurant in my home town, or a construction company. Which path would you aspire to walk? Rand oversimplifies it in D’Anconia’s speech, but I don’t think she would critique markets for allowing those ‘poop-flinging’ opportunities to exist, but rather the character of people who pursue them. Call me naive, but I truly believe most people would prefer to make money by starting a restaurant or a construction company, rather than pandering to hatred of a political party.
Bill Conerly
Sep 20 2022 at 11:43pm
My favorite; as a high school student I was given a couple of minutes at a high school assembly and read the passage after the Wet Nurse’s (Non-Absolute’s) death (p. 994 hardback, p. 923 paperback):
“He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly – yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.
From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!” – “Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!” – “Don’t argue, obey!” – “Don’t try to understand, believe!” – “Don’t struggle, compromise!” – “Your heart is more important than your mind!” – “Who are you to know? Your parents know best!” – “Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!” – “Who are you to object? All values are relative!” – “Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet? That’s only a personal prejudice!”
Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival – yet that was what they did to their children.”
P.S. My son recently told me that I owned three copies of Atlas Shrugged. I said he was wrong. He hadn’t counted the hardback copy in the family room.
David Henderson
Sep 21 2022 at 3:19pm
I love that passage too.
Mactoul
Sep 21 2022 at 1:39am
Might I interest you in this famous review of Atlas Shrugged?
I should greatly appreciate your review of this review.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/
John Webb
Sep 21 2022 at 1:37pm
Try this for size.
Whittaker Chambers’s Review of Ayn Rand’s Novel “Atlas Shrugged” in The National Review by Michael Berliner | Capitalism Magazine
Mactoul
Sep 21 2022 at 10:49pm
Conservatism isn’t reducible to anti-collectivism. And atheist metaphysics, however anti-collectivist and rational, is bound to lead to some very unreasonable consequences.
David Henderson
Sep 21 2022 at 3:19pm
I read it years ago and I don’t plan to reread it. It’s a hatchet job. The “gas chamber” is so incredibly over the top. And I say that as someone who loved Chambers’s book Witness.
Mactoul
Sep 21 2022 at 10:45pm
Yet you are made uneasy with Randian idea that unheroic lives don’t deserve to live.
robc
Sep 21 2022 at 11:49pm
I wonder what Chambers thought of Tolkien? As he makes clear, there is a big difference between thinking someone deserves death and actively killing them.
Mike W
Sep 21 2022 at 7:25pm
I loved this speech while reading the book moons ago. Good to see it finally penetrating.
AtlasShrugged69
Sep 23 2022 at 10:47am
I don’t play baseball, but I’d let Rand pinch-hit for me any day of the week
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