How Many Bricklayers Did Galt Invite to the Gulch?
Galt went around inviting famous artists, noted business leaders to the Guch, but once there, who built their houses? Who paved their streets, dug their sewer lines?
This isn't a class warfare argument; the building of a house, for example, not only takes a skilled architect, but also skilled craftsmen and industrious laborers.
If the criterion for admission is a belief in "trading value for value", surely Galt should and would have invited "ordinary" workers to the Gulch as well as luminaries like Wyatt and Danagger?
Such people exist lower down on the ladder; people who believe in trading value for value, but lack the creative ability to invent a new motor or miraculous metal. People who didn't inherit an already successful railroad or copper mines, but would be able to get a day's worth of coal or copper dug in a day's worth of hours for a day's worth of pay. Maybe they lack the ambition to go through the headache of running a company when they get more satisfaction from digging coal out of the ground. Maybe they lack the self discipline necessary to see their visions to reality, but are still able and still believe in trading value for value.
What Utopians always underestimate in their rhetoric (no disparagement of Ms Rand intended) is the example America set before them. People's abilities and worth are not necessarily evidenced by their position in life. All the creative brilliance in the world will not get a brick wall built. A brick wall built without knowledge and skill won't stand, but the most creative and brilliantly designed wall will never exist without someone to lay it up brick by brick. Someone whose creative skill may be shrouded by prejudice toward his position in life.
There may not be a place in the Gulch for someone like me. But that would be Galt's loss.
This isn't a class warfare argument; the building of a house, for example, not only takes a skilled architect, but also skilled craftsmen and industrious laborers.
If the criterion for admission is a belief in "trading value for value", surely Galt should and would have invited "ordinary" workers to the Gulch as well as luminaries like Wyatt and Danagger?
Such people exist lower down on the ladder; people who believe in trading value for value, but lack the creative ability to invent a new motor or miraculous metal. People who didn't inherit an already successful railroad or copper mines, but would be able to get a day's worth of coal or copper dug in a day's worth of hours for a day's worth of pay. Maybe they lack the ambition to go through the headache of running a company when they get more satisfaction from digging coal out of the ground. Maybe they lack the self discipline necessary to see their visions to reality, but are still able and still believe in trading value for value.
What Utopians always underestimate in their rhetoric (no disparagement of Ms Rand intended) is the example America set before them. People's abilities and worth are not necessarily evidenced by their position in life. All the creative brilliance in the world will not get a brick wall built. A brick wall built without knowledge and skill won't stand, but the most creative and brilliantly designed wall will never exist without someone to lay it up brick by brick. Someone whose creative skill may be shrouded by prejudice toward his position in life.
There may not be a place in the Gulch for someone like me. But that would be Galt's loss.
Previous comments... You are currently on page 5.
You seem to also believe those who labor have no ability to reason and are subject to collectivist thoughts.
Sounds to me like you've made a habit of hiring from the bottom of the barrel. No surprise you wouldn't understand Rand.
FWIW I built my own house by myself. Took two years of working every night and weekend. A very nice post and beam if I do say so. Milled my own siding in my personal design. All wood interior and made all the trim work myself. If your the builder you say you are you should realize even a common laborer can do it IF they desire it enough.
A man who makes his living with a shovel or trowel is not necessarily regulated to using only those tools. A man with an engineering degree can have other skills besides engineering. Why would you not know these simple truths?
PS it never looks smart to threaten murder upon fictional characters or real humans for that matter.
You may want to seek counseling.
and you're still not doing it.
I've helped make that point in here several times.
"I see Galt as thinking himself superior to those around him, as Rand shows in the episode......"
and you finish the sentence. If you can.
Your first line that quotes me " "both men would be equal in terms of effort"... hardly. A professional bricklayer would bury an amateur, by definition... at laying brick" Is ludicrous. Why would you be measuring a man skilled in one area against another man performing the same task whose skill is in another area. The premise means to apply your own effort within your own area of expertise...it is on this basis that their respective efforts are equal. Shall I now mention how that bricklayer would be incapable of laying a single brick. Have you assumed that the bricks just popped into existence? Have you any idea what is required for a single brick to be a brick? Have you discounted geologists, chemists, physicists, the tools required to quarry and how those tools came to be. I don't know what to tell you.. go look up how a brick is made and for each item used start listing the creators required for each element to come into existence so that industrialists and investors could collaborate to erect a plant that would produce bricks cheap enough to be affordable, that a tradesman could spend a few months of his life learning the ropes in order that he may become a bricklayer. The minute you understand that the bricklayer has benefited by the many brilliant individuals, whose combined efforts made a brick possible, you may start to see the world differently, and for what it is.
Jumping and skipping over a few things. Ayn Rand stated that there is no requirement for everybody to be an Objectivist, only that no one should impede the men that innovate on moral terms (no force) and if a man wishes to choose another way of living, then that is perfectly fine, but he has no right to claim that another man should have to have a mortgage on his life because he needs it. I cannot state it enough, no Utopia required. I've already given the example of capitalism in terms of a fully unregulated, laissez-faire economy..also not a utopia.
I'm not prepared to give any more time. Accept you're wrong in that you have not yet grasped the philosophy, and if you choose to learn about it, do it with: not a closed mind, not an open mind, but with your own active mind. I shall not be commenting further on this post.
I notice you've skipped through the thread, sprinkling discord where possible, and whining about why there wouldn't be a place for you, despite the multitude of examples that you are given FROM THE BOOK to refute that position.
I don't want you in the Gulch because the persona you have projected here is obnoxious, whiny, indifferent, weaselly, supercilious, class-driven, derogatory and generally a pain in the ass.
If that was your intention, congratulations, you made it. If it wasn't, sit down and shut up open up your mind and your ears [eyes?] and do your best to learn something.
Yes, since Rand made him the inventor of a doubletalk drive, he can do anything, unfettered by the laws of spacetime.
"mentally masturbated about a world the way they would like it verses the way it actually is."
pretty much nails it.
I'm not talking about the wealthy vs the poor. I'm talking about bringing into the Gulch people who aren't brilliant and virtuous and physically superior like Rand's supermen. I'm talking about bringing in people who are hod carriers because they didn't pay attention in high school, not because they believe in the nobility of physical labor (which is pure unadulterated horse manure).
If you're going to build a city, you're going to need them. Egypt and Rome needed their slaves, the U.S. needed its immigrants and slaves. Someone to do the unrewarding physical labor because they're paid to do so, not because they believe in trading value for value.
This whole argument is impossible because Rand's heroes DO NOT EXIST. She can give them whatever BS qualities she wants. But a normal, sane human being isn't going to spend a year building a log cabin, living outdoors, when he can hire it built in a month or two by "common" laborers. Yes, there are people who get off on doing that kind of thing. The technical term for such people is "nuts".
And the common laborers brought in to do such work will have no interest whatsoever in politics or social engineering. To them, because they've never wasted their time studying such things, raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00 based on need can, and will, be made to sound reasonable.
Again, unless they can keep the Gulch segregated, exclusive to objectivists, it will soon resemble the real world. And if they're going to build the city in a reasonable amount of time while destroying the world, they're going to need the labor I described above. So they won't be able to keep the Gulch segregated.
You may not like me saying "destroy the world".
How does the world end up at the end of the book, before the strikers come back? Pretty much destroyed, yes?
Due to the intentional efforts of Galt and company.
A great idea has been put forth to transport large 3D printers to the moon with a resin and build their structures from moon dust. If Galt could design and build a motor that runs from the charge in the air, I'm sure he thought of this for the Gulch. Problem solved.
Now I can only reply to your discourse, not to where I think that discourse comes from. You say it's impossible for that writer or that econ prof to learn how to lay brick or pipe or string a high-rise electric line.
And that is simply not correct. I'm not saying you're lying; I'm saying you're mistaken. Hey: if I can learn how to camp out and cook a meal on a fire in the out-of-doors, I can learn to lay brick, or logs, or whatever, or string an electric line, or lay pipe for a water main or a sewer. But can everyone learn to do what I do? No. That's why people become bricklayers: because they can't learn to do anything higher than that.
The whole point of Rand's work is that the mystical/altruistic/collectivist/statist system assumed without warrant, even decreed, that there was no such thing as any person smarter than any other person. And on that basis they decreed equality of economic result.
So John Galt stood up in that factory hangar and said, in so many words: "All right. You think we can't get along without you? We will show you we certainly can. And then let YOU try to get along without US."
Now the only thing missing is this: how do you treat the one who never went along with the looters' state, but who cannot design electrostatic motors, as John Galt did (or reverse-engineer them, as Quentin Daniels did)? Or invent a new substitutionary/interstitial alloy of iron, copper, and carbon, as Henry Rearden did? The answer: John Galt removed the prime movers first. Then he declared, "All others who see our point, decamp from the looters' society now!" And they did, and formed their own camps. And maybe they didn't lay any bricks. Maybe they lived as the Native Americans ("Indians", "Amerinds") did.
But Galt's Gulch was never to be a permanent settlement. It was a place of refuge. That it turned into "the rallying center for such outposts of civilization as [others would] build" was only because the society collapsed faster and sooner than John Galt even thought possible.
Load more comments...