Yes, physical force. If it were “economic force” that was not allowed, then strikes would not be allowed. That’s also “economic force”.
John, wait a tick. The Vice President in Charge of Operations is the representative of the Common Man? Seriously? Does he polish the floors after everybody else goes home? Makes $11 an hour?
I know you of old, you are neither sneaky nor stupid, so I am at a loss as to how you can offer this with a straight face.
Is he the common man because he does not have the astounding talents and genius of Galt? Is he some sort of token, then? Written in as an afterthought, perhaps, to counter the stench of elitism that pervades the book? For my two bits, an injustice based on ability and intelligence is not much of an improvement on injustice based on who your parents were, or the effectiveness of your greedy instincts. YMMV.
Well, good, they are not allowed to hire Pinkertons to break heads! Definitely a step in the right direction! But they can hire lawyers to tangle you up in court, lawyers that you may not be able to afford. They can pressure the printing company not to print you pamphlets, they can buy television time to put our propaganda about what a Communist scoundrel you are.
But they can’t crack your skull! Whew! What a relief!
Yes, that’s exactly it. That was explicitly stated in the quote, so I’m not sure why you have to ask.
Yes. She put him in there to make the story more realistic. 
Eddie is one of the main characters. But there are many minor characters, some making only a cameo appearance, who are just getting by, economically. She chose not to focus on any of those particularly. I didn’t find that to be a flaw. If I want to see everyday people, I can just look out the window.
Special Assistant to the Vice-President in Charge of Operations.
But not the mirror?
No, not the mirror.
They would if they were desperate enough. There is a large gap between enough so that it’s better working than living on the street, and “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.” This gap increases markedly if there is no safety net, as one assumes there is not in GG. For such work as taking out the garbage where the difference between a talented worker and one just out of the gutter is small, there is no incentive to pay any more than “just enough to make working better than starving”.
The workers aren’t ‘forced’ to do anything. You have a bizarre view of labor relations - you seem to think that employees have guns held to their heads, and that their labor is ‘exploited’ if people above them make ‘too much’. This is a common view on the left, which makes it no less bizarre.
You also seem to be under the impression that the value in a firm is nothing more than the sum total of the labor of the workers. Marx’s old ‘labor theory of value’, I guess. It’s total nonsense. In reality, the relationship between an employer and an employee is mutually beneficial - an auto worker earns much more than he could on his own because his labor is magnified by millions of dollars of capital investment in assembly lines, and by the value the firm brings in the form of institutional knowledge, the organization of supply chains, sales forces, you name it. The managers of a business create value by being smart enough to organize different forms of labor together into a machine that is greater than the sum of its parts. For that, they are compensated, and because their decisions are more highly leveraged, they tend to earn more.
No one in this large chain of labor and management is being ‘forced’ to do anything. It all exists through voluntary agreement, although lefties spend an inordinate amount of time contorting themselves into pretzels to convince themselves that it’s nothing more than the powerful exploiting the weak and that somehow labor is so weak that they really have no choices at all, and therefore are ‘forced’ to do management’s bidding.
I have no idea what kind of quote you’re looking for. A quote that says what? That Ayn Rand agrees with Marx that only labor has value, and therefore management earning more is ‘force’? I’m afraid I can’t help you there.
Rest assured that I have read the book. Several times. I’ve read everything Rand wrote, including all of her non-fiction. To be honest, I’m not a big fan of Atlas Shrugged. I find it ponderous and meandering. The Fountainhead is a much better book, in my opinion.
You don’t understand - the ‘moochers’ in the book are the rich and powerful. Most of the antagonists are rich and powerful. One of the main political issues in the book was the ‘Anti-dog-eat-dog’ rule, crafted by a bunch of industrialists who couldn’t compete with Dagny’s railroad, and used ‘fairness’ as a back door to hamstring her operations.
Another was the “Equalization of Opportunity” bill - again, a bill pushed by rich people who were threatened by Hank Reardon’s superior steel formulation.
All of these bills and other shenanigans by the antagonists in the book are crafted in the language of ‘equality’, ‘opportunity’, ‘fairness’, and ‘protecting the little guy’. All of them are in fact mechanisms for crony capitalists and lobbyists to steal for themselves what they couldn’t earn on their own merits.
In today’s world, Rand’s villains wouldn’t be workers - they’d be the CEOs of the companies who use government to manipulate markets in their favor - and the politicians, lobbyists and intellectuals who enable their behavior. If she were alive today, she would have been firing on all cylinders against the cronies at Goldman-Sachs, Citibank, GE, and other large corporations lobbying government in their favor.
I quite understand, I prefer not to be reminded of my astonishing resemblance to George Clooney.
I’m more Tom Selleck than Clooney, but I know the feeling!
Thank you, Sam, for your review of the catechism of capitalism. Did you imagine that you were imparting new and astonishing information? I’ve heard the arguments, and made the counter arguments, as I’m sure you have.
But this tugs at my heart…
Oh, you poor dear! They don’t have sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll in Canada?
Yes, that’s the caricature. Oh, those poor workers who really have no choices at all! But of course, in a world with no government safety net, you can imagine that the culture would be different - a different culture of savings, different forms of mutual aid societies, etc. This would be doubly so for the kind of people that would choose to move to Galt’s Gulch in the first place. They would internalize the need to be responsible for their own actions, and therefore not put themselves in a position where they can be exploited. For example, not choosing to work there until they had enough savings to buy a ticket out if the situation became intolerable. Or, they could insist on contract terms that protect them from such exploitation.
Howard Roarke is put in such a position in The Fountainhead, and chooses to go to work as a day laborer rather than submit to the ‘exploitation’. He would have chosen to starve, if need be.
In addition, the kind of people that inhabit Galt’s Gulch would never dream of getting together to collude to exploit the workers through force. They would want to pay workers what they were worth to them - no more, no less. Any businessman who went to another and said, "I know our workers won’t work for X, but if we collude together so that they have no choice, they’ll have to succumb!’ would be summarily ejected from Galt’s Gulch. Or rather, no one would do business with him and he’d be forced to leave. And if the businesses in GG sell to customers who also live there, the customers would not buy their products once they discovered the employees were being forced to work through extortion.
We can argue if this is realistic in the ‘real world’ or not. But Rand’s work is romantic fiction - an exploration of what an idealized world might look like. Rand used to say that she wasn’t interested in writing cold realism and all its nuances, but in writing fiction that showed man at his best - and worst. She used archetypes and extremes as a way to ‘cut to the chase’ and reduce essential philosophical issues to their bare essence without all the confusion and nuance that realism brings. Like it or not, there is a large tradition of such works. Lefties just hate Rand for it because she used the technique to criticize them and their philosophy.
How does one determine what a “fair day’s pay” is?
Oh, I had Rock 'n roll. I was too poor to afford drugs, and being a science nerd the sex part was sadly infrequent. In any event, I followed the pattern of a lot of Rand readers - I was entranced by a lot of it when I was in my teens, but as I became more educated about her and the world in general I was disillusioned by much of what she said and repelled by her as a person. Now I have her filed in a box in my brain labelled ‘crazy intolerant person, albeit with some interesting things to say.’ Right next to Paul Krugman.
OK I’ll chalk it up to the assumption that GG like other utopian constructs is made up of perfect people. Of course if you assume perfect people than you pretty much always get Utopia no matter what the structure, be it a Communist workers paradise, objectivist Galt Gulch, or Hippy age of Aquarius.
Rather a fan of Mr. Krugman, given my limitations. The Chipmunk from Mensa. But perhaps if you point out to me examples of his vicious bigotry and intolerance, I will change my mind. If you have such.
Yeah, I’m not seeing Krugman in the same “crazy” category as Rand. She was a control freak’s control freak. Krugman was a better economist than political hack, and it’s a shame he’s more of the latter than the former these days, but I don’t see him as crazy.
That’s exactly the question. Presumably the employer and the employee have different opinions about this. The free market seems to favor the idea that the majority of the gains should go to person who has the least to lose should the employment arrangement cease, ie the least desperate. Which of course means the rich get richer and the poor manage to possibly survive. So if GG was run on free market economics, that did not place a moral priority on a providing respectable wage (unlike Sam stone says GG does), then presumably the people who took out the trash would be an overworked underclass, desperately trying to earn just enough to avoid being cast out of GG for vagrancy.
I’m not sure why you would assume that. Most people arrive in GG penniless, since outside currency is not worth anything. A factory owner was just as likely as not to be in debt to someone like Midas Mulligan to get things started. Without a working factory, they would be worth negative money, not zero money.