Atlas Shrugged Coming To The Theater Just In Time

April 15th Atlas Shrugged comes to the theater. Besides the Bible it is the most read book in the world. I read it forty years ago and was blown away. Ayn Rand, a Russian Jew, wrote it in 1957. The danger of collectivism seemed far away back in the 70's, but today today it seems prophetic. I tried to read it again, but at 1,200 pages it's a chore. I used to read big books like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Clan of the Cave Bear etc. without problem. I have lost my patience with wordy books, however within Ayn Rands's 1,200 page novel you will find excerpts like the speech below that make all those pages worth it.


"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? 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. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. 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? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. 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.

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.

"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.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

Students Keep Me Young

HYPER-SYRINGE-EDEMIA

Students really keep me young. They are so intense. They try to set up for the whole day's cases before 7 am. It's my mission to purge them of all the academic mumbo-jumbo they are taught at the University. Hopefully when they graduate they will be more competent than the public employees that make the daily news.

Air-Traffic Controllers asleep in the tower.
Miniature Train derails one hour after being inspected; one child dead, a dozen injured.
TSA workers allow box-cutters on a plane
Security Guard at a Federal Building finds a briefcase outside and brings it into the building; ten days later they discover it contains a bomb.

I always tell my students "We don't want to be on the six o'clock news tonight, DO WE!"

I Need Help, I'm In An Abusive Relationship

Down deep in my heart I knew the A/C in my 93 Olds wasn't going to be fixed by changing to Earth Day Freon. The freon leaked out in about two days. So I need a compressor. That's $440, ouch! I can't drive in the Spring heat of 75 degrees, let alone in in the Summer when it's 90 degrees and 80% humidity. This is it for the Olds; it's 18 years old and has 164 K miles on it. It's worth $1000 retail at best. When the fall comes I'm going to sell it or give it away. I had a good run with it, especially the first 140 K miles. By the way, that 1998 Cadillac of my neighbor's sold for only $2,5oo, that's half of Blue Book. I'm kicking myself but then again I couldn't have offered her less than $4,000 and looked her in the eye again.

I'm really going to sell it in the fall; that's a vow.

My Olds Is OK; It's Me That's Nuts

My Oldsmobile is OK. I just forgot that I gassed it up two weeks ago and didn't drive it for ten days. I noticed the gauge did seem to be a mm below the full so I gassed it and it took all of 3.5 gal. Now the gas gauge needle is about 3 mm above the full mark. Now I was all set to do the odometer thing, but the A/C problem still had me wondering whether I should get the nativity scene and chi-chi balls and sell it. Today I got the A/C fixed for $140. They had to convert it to Al-Gore-Freon and fill it. It won't be as cold as it used to be with Freon-12 but hopefully it won't leak out before next November. I just have to schmooze that leaky muffler through one more inspection (the mechanic has been looking at it for the last four years and shaking his head).

That little blue beauty above is Ben's Mini-Cooper Romano-Edition. In two years he will bring it back to the U.S. and maybe give it to me. I hope it survives the Rome traffic, which I hear is like a video game. You see if you live long enough, your children eventually give you stuff.

A Miracle

Now that gas is about $3.50/gal my Oldsmobile has solved my problems. My gas gauge has been on full for three weeks. It's like a miracle from Peter Popoff , the widows oil that never ran out. I wish it was, but it's probably a short to ground since the needle stays pegged on full. So I guess I can keep going and just use the 1960 VW gas gauge; just keep tract of the mileage on the trip odometer .

What's worse is that the temperature is getting into the high seventies and I already miss the A/C which was the Oldsmobile's best feature. I can't believe how hot it is in this car without A/C. I even use a sun-shade when I park it and it still is like a dutch oven. That along with the need for a muffler makes me think it's time to sell this money pit.

FOR SALE CHEAP

SE HABLA ESPANOL

A Smart and Witty Polemic

After reading the Millennium Trilogy and giving up on the apocalyptic "EMP bomb hits Mayberry" novel I'm now reading a "smart and witty polemic". It's about how snarkiness is replacing wit and satire in the internet age. I'm trying to grasp his argument, but it sometimes eludes me like music and foreign languages. I'm sure my literary daughter and son-in-law would understand it perfectly (like the way I understand the autonomic nervous system).

I'm about 40 pages into this 120 page essay so there is hope. I'm thinking snark is sort of like the cheap shot. The lazy person's attempt at humor combined with an element of sadism.

I'm thinking it relates more to shame where a person's value is demeaned, not just their speech and behavior. Whatever it exactly is, it flourishes in the internet wasteland of Facebook and Twitter. I'll try to get through the next eighty pages, but perhaps it would be easier to mail it to Marianne and David and have them tell me what point the author is making. It all started with Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting Of The Snark."

Stay-cation 2.1

I can't believe what I heard on the radio today. Volvo's heavy equipment headquarters is moving out of Asheville. Now Volvo has been pulling out of Asheville for the last five years in installments, sort of like Kodak leaving that socialist hell-hole called Rochester. Volvo is moving the rest of its operation to Pennsylvania. How bad does it have to be in western N.C. for a company to move to PA? There will be a loss of about 230 jobs. The kicker is that the director of economic development said, "on the brighter side there is a large facility available now for another business". That person should be fired just for saying something that stupid. Then there would be another office available for another bureaucrat to move into. This reminds me of Obama telling a crowd there is no inflation because the price of the i-pad has gone down. Someone in the crowd yelled out " I can't eat an i-pad."

Well I survived my root-canal. I guess it was a challenging one. I really did have some dental PID (pus-in-dare). I was in the chair for for an hour and forty five minutes. I probably slept for an hour of it (I always fall asleep at the dentist). I figure it cost me about $24 per minute. I must be slipping, I only charge $4 per minute. So far I only have lost one tooth. I stopped getting my teeth cleaned because I always get the chubby hygienist.

On Easter Babba is making his musical debut. I am to accompany Carol the violin virtuoso with my Irish Bodhran. It will be a duel of who can play the softest. I look at it this way, it's just another instrument to fail at.

Just four more days of stay-cation. I can do it, although CP has started taking Lyrica.

Stay-cation

I'm on a forced vacation. It's use it or lose it. Since March isn't a big vacation month I'm just going to stay home and take care of business. Today I renewed my driver's license. I usually move before I have to do this. It's not due for a few months ,but they sent me a reminder card. This being N.C. where everything is a royal pain, I thought I better get this done while I have a full day to commit to the DMV. I called to make sure I didn't need my Social Security Card, Birth Certificate, Proof of Insurance, Passport, Credit Report, Proof of Vaccination, Background Check and latest Colonoscopy report and T.B. Test. I was surprised to find out all I needed was my present license and cash.

They did tell me to try to come in early because it tended to get crowded after ten AM. So I set off with a granola bar and a book; I figured I was in for a siege. When I arrived here six years ago and went to get my license the place was packed with more Mexicans than Home Depot. I thought I was at INS instead of the DMV. So I arrived ready for the usual bureaucratic inertia and was surprised to find three people ahead of me. It took less than ten minutes. I recognized the signs and could read the second line without my glasses so the state has granted me the privilege of driving for eight more years.

I happened to bring with me that book (One Second After) my coworker lent me about terrorists setting off an electro-magnetic-pulse bomb (EMP) in Black Mountain, N.C. The EMP bomb knocks out all computers and electronics in the south east. In effect, anything that uses a computer, including cars, cell phones, power plants, etc are toast. I didn't want the examiner to think I was one of those foil-hat wearing survivalists, so I turned it over on the desk. Now a book about Armageddon written by a local college professor that takes place in our area does get attention. The examiner tells me to sit in the chair for my new license photo, then he says "I'm going to take your picture, unless an electro-magnetic-pulse knocks out my camera." Imagine that, a state employee with a sense of humor; I shouldn't be such a stranger to the DMV.

Tomorrow, day two of my stay-cation, I'm getting a root-canal; WHOOPEE!

Baby Laughing Hysterically at Ripping Paper

Can someone hand this baby the Health Care Reform Bill. In a week he could shred all 2,700 pages.

Anaesthetists Hymn

I'm sitting home on a rainy weekend with a couple of books I don't feel like reading. I went on line looking for a logo for my new company. It didn't take long to find one. I also found this video that described my job prior to before Fun-Suckers in Washington took over.