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.
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Never was there a less professional professional than Howard Roark.
However, if one intentionally removes the bolts from the axle holding the wheel in place, thus letting the wheel careen across the room and smash against the wall, one is still intentionally destroying the wheel.
An example of such destruction is the Obama administration. Sworn to "fundamentally transform" the country, his policies must, intentionally or not, destroy the country as it is in order to transform it into what he envisions it to be.
I just don't see where Galt has the right to do that any more than Obama does.
The difference between an amateur craftsman and a professional craftsman is both the quality of the work, but more importantly, the proficiency. You may well, in a reasonable period of time, learn to lay up a brick wall that might not look to bad or be too far out of plumb. It might take you a week to get it built, however, when it would take a professional half a day.
Of course, that wouldn't teach you to lay flagstone, or build a natural fireplace chimney, or even alternate bonds. It wouldn't teach you to recognize the necessary consistency of mortar, how or why to tool various joints, or a thousand other little things that a professional learns over time.
Meanwhile, while you're screwing around with playing amateur construction worker, you're not busy recruiting people to come to the gulch; you're not busy stalking Dagney Taggart; you're not busy inventing (out of thin air) magical force/invisibility fields.
So, Galt brings in some of this otherwise worthless cattle to employ in order to free himself up to do his world-saving... and they re-introduce all the hated aspects of the society-at-large that he wished to escape in the Gulch.
I don't care how badly I may want to, I'll never be able to be an NFL quarterback. I lack the *physical* ability. You can't just learn to lay brick because you want to, no matter how brilliant you are. It takes years of training to become proficient at it.
And my whole point was nicely summed up by you... "Building brick walls may not be something he prefers to do". In point of fact, doing so would be a waste of his real abilities and time.
There's a reason why the Antebellum South was dependent on slave labor, and why the Industrial North was dependent on immigrant labor (who in may cases were treated worse than the Southern slaves).
No amount of brilliance is going to get a physically demanding job done in a reasonable amount of time, particularly and leave the brilliant one time to do his brilliant thing.
I was fine with Galt forming his own little world when he didn't approve of the way the real world was working. But when he started actively torturing Dagney by taking away people she needed in order to save *her* little world, just to *coerce* her into becoming his... the he was no different than the progressives he was fighting against.
See, back in the early 1980s, there was this 4th generation master mason, a contractor with 37 years experience and who'd taught countless bricklayers their trade over the years (including myself) who was doing a contract job to make a university handicapped accessible.
Being friendly with the staff, he got word that they were going to hire someone to teach a masonry vo-tech class over the summer. He applied for the position, but was refused because he lacked a piece of paper; a college degree.
The job went to a professor at the college who had spent a summer as a mason-tender.
When Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged, bricklayers were making more per week than most white collar workers; until the illegal alien invasion, it was, as were all the trades, a respected profession. Except by those who spent their lives in academia.
Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, so Mulligan might have built his house out of moonrock he scaled in himself.
It's not as easy as one might think to build a house out of logs or to hew furniture; and the result isn't going to resemble a ski resort.
And, btw, one cannot necessarily teach a creative man to lay brick. Steven Hawking is brilliant and will never lay a single brick. Some people simply lack the eye-hand coordination for the work. It takes decades to make a master mason, which is more than simply slapping rectangles of dried clay on a wall. The same for master carpenters, plumbers, electricians (of which they were going to need a freaking ton).
But my point has been missed. It takes no creative skill at all to learn to dig a ditch, even a straight one. But it does take *man hours*. The time Mulligan spent building his log cabin was time he wasn't spending doing what HE does best, time he wasn't spending exercising his creative skills. He's free to waste his time however he chooses, but if one is going to build a city, it's going to take manpower. Manpower that isn't as monetarily valuable as designing the city, for tasks that are a waste of the more valuable time of people who can invent doubletalk drives.
I'm trying to imagine what building his own log cabin did to Richard Halley's hands.
Galt et al simply would not have had the time for their nefarious schemes to lure the productive away from the world, to keep a job at Taggart Transcontinental, and build homes that were fit to live in, except by the standards of 19th century western settlers.
Did they build everything out of logs? The linings for the sewer pipes, the electrical conductors to carry electricity to the houses; were the lightbulbs made out of wood?
Unless the Gulch was a magical place with immense deposits of natural resources undetectable by satellite, they're not going to have the copper for wires, for example. That will take mines, refineries, machine tools to draw the wire, spools to wrap it on, crops and livestock to feed them while they're working, and likewise farmers, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers...
And most of these people are not creative elite who design doubletalk drives over a weekend or compose a symphony on the back of a napkin.
You *will*, inevitably, if you are to provide the raw manpower necessary, get some people, possibly a measurable percentage of people, who still support, to one degree or another, the collectivist philosophy dominant by the time of directive 10-289.
Galt's Gulch can only work through segregation; segregating the objectivists and libertarians from everyone else. And I don't think such segregation is possible and still build the city.
at some point it's not efficient to do everything oneself unless it's something one really enjoys.
We are all speculating on Galt's Gulch and Rand's attitude toward the "average" worker. I think you find that spelled out very clearly when she has Dagny stop a hobo from being thrown from her moving train. He had badly worn, but clean, well mended clothing. His pride in self caught her attention.
It is all a question not of abilities, either physical or mental, but a question of the tenacious grasp of "self". Pride, integrity, independence, industry, all are aspects of the "self". John Galt set out to stop the motor of the world. To do that he took out the biggest, most difficult to duplicate cogs. All the parts were necessary, but there was no way it could run with out the biggest cogs. And it had more PR value for Galt's goal than pulling out the bricklayers and truck drivers.
And, BTW, I'm a 64 year old grandmother with a business degree from TCU where I graduated cum laude. I can use a chain saw, a nail gun, and drive an F750, 26ft box truck as well as a large John Deere tractor. Being intelligent and successful doesn't mean you can't lay brick. So when you say they didn't build their own homes, I call BS on that. Dagny built the terraces in front of the cabin where she stayed. I built my log cabin in Colorado.
True genius does not apply to only one skill. These people, architects, writers, financiers, Wall Street moguls, were never above hard work. As Howard Roark proved in the Fountainhead, he could plan the most beautiful buildings in the world, but when he was rejected he could also break the rocks that go into those buildings.
They were their own bricklayers.
A very significant incident, it is not referred to anywhere later, I only got what it meant on my second reading.
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