Atlas Shrugged: So What?

Shake Down

If you have been loyal to your boss for the last 25 years or so, it most likely has earned you at best flat wages. Atlas Shrugged became a mantra during the Reagan years, and a market free of government intervention was theoretically supposed to yield greater innovation. Instead, avarice prevailed on a personal level and joined with that most human of vices in all areas of leadership. Complain and you are likely to hear that you’re lucky to have a job. “You wanna quit? There are thousands lined up to take your place.” That phrase has been used–and accepted–far longer than the financial nosedive of 2008. Whether outsourcing, making cuts to save the company, or failing in the middle of economic meltdowns, business executives target labor as the greatest drag on the profit. This presents a “quick fix” to pleasing shareholders expecting year-over-year growth that not only keeps up with inflation, but surpasses it. Decades of band-aids to make sure bonuses led to a middle class overly reliant on credit to continue levels of consumerism required to support their lofty predictions. When unsecured credit failed, collateral wealth found in homeowner equity eked out a few more years. Then: Poof! An entire economic leg, the consumer class, is no longer able to support its part of the stool in free-market capitalism.

While many things contributed to the meltdown that set up a political standoff taking us over a “fiscal cliff,” there is only one political motivator to pluck the strings of our collective fears and that is the motivation to support the things as they are of wealth distribution among those that already have it. Deficits and taxes carry a heavy political price in the Age of Atlas, which leaves austerity an inevitable endpoint to all the theatrics between the White House and Congress. Sequestration didn’t occur as a better solution for the economy because it would force politicians to behave responsibly. Rather it became the point of plausible deniability they could all count on to save them from campaign ads that would surely haunt them in primary season.

Playing to fears of unemployment and the “anemic recovery” that minimum wage increases will cause further underscores the desperate to prevent government intervention in the free market. What the naysayers fail to mention is there are myriad ways around the minimum wage including contracting out work, changing worker status, or paying a $455/week salaried minimum instead of an hourly wage. Meanwhile, with interest rates charged to banks at a continued all-time low of zero, profits were inevitable if they could manage to keep their executive bonuses in check long enough. One person’s intervention is another person’s protection.

Why do businesses object to paying a living wage when not only will it remove the need to subsidize workers through taxpayer-funded programs, but increase the number of consumers to purchase its product? The Atlas of Ayn Rand’s classic is an industrial entrepreneur of a bygone era when magnates laid railroad connecting the nation. Today’s Atlas is busy on a treadmill, both literally and metaphorically, and pays others not to hold the world on their shoulders, but to shake any extra change loose from the couch cushions. That is why the new innovations emerge from eager minds with a firm grasp of new media and technologies as we move toward a sharing economy.

Among other things, Ayn Rand presented the world with her resounding indictment of personal altruism, proclaiming self-interest as more effective and genuine means of improving social plights in the long run. Despite a post-revolutionary Russia that allowed women such as herself to receive an education, Rand indicted the system for its inability to meet its promises to the population pointing instead to the great successes achieved in the free market system found in the United States. Today, that system is beset by multi-national corporations run by executives whose self-interests are in shareholder value for the short-term since the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO, usually protected by a golden parachute clause, is just over 4 years. With global consumers far outstripping the US population, a tax burden relative to income weighted most heavily on the middle class, executive income based on short-term performance, and no laws protecting the rights of everyone in the economic chain, there is no incentive to support a free and fair market in America. The intrusion of corporations into the affairs of government upheld by courts that once stood for the individual, and the erosion of Net Neutrality with well-heeled players pit against a public bisected by faux political ideology reduces their need for your vote either in the polls or the market.

In short: They don’t need you.